


So Familiar A Gleam

by synonymouse



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: And some fluff I guess, Angst, Canon Compliant, Crisis of Faith, Dreams, Dreamsharing, F/M, Friendship, I am so obsessed with Solas it ain't funny, Present Tense, Pretentious waffle, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-24
Updated: 2015-04-17
Packaged: 2018-03-19 10:37:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 78
Words: 27,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3607032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/synonymouse/pseuds/synonymouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His name means ‘pride’; hers is replaced by a symbol. She believes he will help her remember who she is, but instead she loses herself in him. He is the man of her dreams, she is not what he expected - and like moths to an unquenchable flame, they are drawn to each other.</p><p>Or, in the words of Varric Tethras: “When Chuckles calls you da’len, is that because he is your protector, or because he thinks you’re cute?”</p><p>  <i>A collection of scenes describing Ellana Lavellan's experiences of her rise to power and the development of her relationship with Solas.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Epigraph

**Author's Note:**

> This fanfic is a work of pure indulgence. Having written [Twisted Together](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2755121/chapters/6176438) according to the rules (mostly), for this story I threw caution to the wind and wrote exactly as I felt like. Beware of comma abuse, fragmented sentences and lots of similes. For all that, I am quite happy with how the text turned out in the end, but feel very unsure of whether anyone else will actually enjoy it. So ... here's hoping?
> 
> (If you have read and enjoyed TT, I'm sorry to say this is not much like it - no smut, for one. But there is an explicit sidestory in the works already, because fuck yeah Solas and kinky dream sex!)
> 
> I think it reads best if you hit the "entire work" button above, as some chapters are very short.
> 
>  **Spoiler check:** This is an embellishment of events that spans the entirety of Dragon Age: Inquisition. Spoilers are plentiful, if vague - mostly the fic probably makes no damn sense if you haven't played the entire game. Familiarity with the Solas romance is also necessary to understand what’s going on. Watch it on youtube if you haven't played it. Like, seriously, watch it, even if you're not gonna read this fic.
> 
>  **Canon check:** Plenty of ingame dialogue is referred to, but none is revisited or rewritten. You may assume that the Ellana Lavellan of this story (nearly) always went with the top dialogue choice (the earnest/diplomatic/friendly one) and was more prone to sadness than any other emotion. I have added elements to her character that may be seen as contrary to canon, but nothing about the original story has been changed. Solas is a difficult character to interpret and you may or may not not agree with how I write him. I don't presume to know his mind, however, so this entire story is written from the perspective of Ellana. Lastly, while clan Lavellan’s Keeper is once referred to as a “he” in a war table mission text, Deshanna strikes me as a distinctively female name, so for this story she’s a woman.
> 
>  **Warnings:** Pretentious writing, some angst toward the end (because duh).
> 
>  **Because elves:** [Elven language](http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Elven_language)
> 
>  **Music**  
>  A number of songs have accompanied the conception and writing of these scenes, or have struck me as relevant or fitting afterwards. Other than the Inquisition soundtrack (particularly the instrumental versions of the tavern songs), these include:
> 
>   * "What A Wonderful World" as heard in the Inquisition trailer
>   * "November Morning" by Stimming, electronic and orchestral versions
>   * Songs from Röyksopp's album "The Inevitable End", particularly "You Know I Have To Go" and "Monument"
>   * Songs from the Braid soundtrack, particularly "Maenam", "Undercurrent" and "Tell It By Heart"
>   * Songs from Björk's album "Vespertine", particularly "Hidden Place"
>   * "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)", as performed by Emily Browning on the Sucker Punch soundtrack
>   * And, of course, the song from whence I took the title: "Once Upon A Dream", as performed by Lana Del Rey on the Maleficent soundtrack
> 


> Then the Maker said:  
>  To you, my second-born, I grant this gift:  
>  In your heart shall burn  
>  An unquenchable flame  
>  All-consuming, and never satisfied.  
>  From the Fade I crafted you,  
>  And to the Fade you shall return  
>  Each night in dreams  
>  That you may always remember me.
> 
> _—Threnodies 5:7_


	2. Arc One

She rose formless through deep dark waters. Breaching the surface, she stepped out of the pond onto a rocky beach. She stretched her new legs in a wild forest, where she ran with the wolves and climbed with the squirrels. She reached a meadow, where she danced with hare and halla, and then she saw a mountain. There, she would find her wings.

Perhaps this once, she would reach them.


	3. Chapter 3

The first time she meets him, he touches her before she even realises he is there, so focused was she on fighting the demons. His fingers wrap tightly around her wrist, thrusting her hand toward the open rift, and there is a nudge and a pouring, tearing sensation. She rebels against it instinctively, pulling back as hard as she can. The rift snaps shut, leaving the air clear and unscarred.

He lets go of her then, and that is the first time she sees him. Eyes like steel in a plain unmarked face; an unassuming expression; the hint of a smile on the corner of his lips. He lets go of her, but she can still feel his hand on her wrist like an imprint, his touch burned into her skin. She rubs at it, trying to still her uneasy soul even as they exchange pleasantries in the midst of a battlefield.

His name means ‘pride’.


	4. Chapter 4

She wakes suddenly, startled and disoriented. For a blissful moment she is convinced she is back with her clan, but there are no furled sails above her, no trees whispering in a gentle breeze – only unfamiliar walls and an unfamiliar face, its mouth opening in shock. Ellana sits up and the elf drops her things, falling to her knees before her. It rends her heart and she tries to stop her, but the servant backs out of the room, excited and terrified, babbling.

Outside the world is bright and word has spread of her awakening. She walks uncertainly through Haven, the crowd watching her with wide open faces. Expectation thickens the air like thunder.

She doesn’t understand what they want with her. She doesn’t understand why she is here. She doesn’t understand what has happened, and she wishes she were back in the Free Marches, with her clan, with her Keeper. She prays, but her faith has no guidance for this strange unknown.

 _Deshanna_ , she thinks, _hahren, what should I do?_

There is no answer, and naught for her to do but follow the path before her. To the chantry of Haven.


	5. Chapter 5

Ellana Lavellan has followers. She tries to tell them they are wrong about her, but still they flock to Haven. They come slowly at first, then in ever growing numbers, a trickle that becomes a stream. Most of them keep at a respectful distance, and she is grateful for that. Some respectfully approach – like the dwarf. He is the first of his kind she has known and he confounds her.

To her surprise (and possibly his) she finds that she enjoys his company. He is honest about how he twists facts to weave his stories, and how they in turn make their own kind of truth.

Varric tells her to make friends. If she wants to protect people, she must understand them, and to understand them she must be one of them, he claims. He gently admonishes her for her seclusion. “You’re too strange to them,” he says. “Sitting on rooftops, staring at the breach. You’re too … Dalish. They can’t relate. And with your looks…”

Although that part hurts, for some reason she trusts his judgment.

She approaches Solas first. Strange as he is, at least he speaks her language. Somehow, she is not surprised when she is met by caution, withdrawal. He wants to know why she asks about him.

After the initial guarded response, her inquisitiveness seems to please him, but the conversation tells her nothing she does not already know. He is from nowhere around. He is not Dalish, nor from an alienage. He is a mage. She finds herself drawn in by his fascination for travelling the Fade, but then they speak of her ‘indomitable focus’ and there is a gleam in his eyes that confuses her. She excuses herself, politely, and runs away to sit on a rooftop (Varric be damned).

He asked her why. Why does she want to know about him?

Because during sleepless nights, she can still feel the touch of his hand on her wrist. It itches like her scars.


	6. Chapter 6

He was talking to someone, but they were gone when she came nearer. He turned to her and smiled. “Aneth ara. What a pleasant surprise.”

“Were you talking about me?” she asked.

“Yes. They are curious about you.”

“Who is?”

“Everyone. Everyone wants to know about the ‘Herald of Andraste’.”

There was a faintly amused look on his face. It chafed as much as his words; she felt as if he were mocking her.

“Fenedhis!” she swore. “I’m no Herald, not of Andraste, not of anything else. I wish they’d just … stop. I wish everyone would just leave me alone.”

“Everyone?”

Anger interrupted, she looked at him, tilting her head slightly. That small, distant smile on his lips. A riddle in his eyes. “Perhaps not everyone,” she admitted.


	7. Chapter 7

Redcliffe is verdant. As a child, when Keeper Deshanna had told her how humans dwelled in permanent buildings made of wood and stone, Ellana always imagined human towns as barren, cold and empty. She thought that was why elves in the alienages brought a tree with them, as a reminder of beauty. But Redcliffe is green as a forest, and the humans move among the trees and flowers as though were they old friends. It puzzles her.

Her companions are resupplying. She perches on a wall, watching people go by. Some glance at her and whisper; she pretends not to notice. A familiar dance, by now.

A lone child stops to gawk at her. Sometimes it’s hard to tell with little runts like this one, especially humans, but she thinks it’s probably a girl. “Your hair is white,” it informs her helpfully. “My gramma’s hair is white too. Are you old like gramma? You don’t look old. You have big ears. My mummy says I shouldn’t stare just cuz you look scary but I don’t think you look scary at all.”

Her ‘r’s come out round and indistinct; ‘scawy’.

“Thank you,” Ellana says, for lack of better lines. Smiling a little, she adds, “I have a big nose, too,” and turns her head this way and that to let her see.

The girl nods in solemn agreement. “What happened to your face?”

She lifts her hands, self-consciously, touching her fingertips to her scars. What happened to her face? Had this been an elven child, she would make up a story. She bragged that she could climb the highest tree in the forest, but fell when put to the test, punished for her pride. She was bitten by the Dread Wolf when she foolishly tried to pull his tail ( _But you said Fen’Harel chewed off his tail!_ they would protest, and she would smile: _All the more foolish to try and pull it_.). Something like that. But what sort of stories do humans tell?

Ellana shrugs. “They’re scars.”

The child waves a hand dismissively. “I know scars.” (Scaws.) “Da has lots of scars. He defended Redcliffe against the monsters! And then he married mummy and then they made my brother and me. You fight monsters too, I saw it! Mummy said I shouldn’t be on the wall but I saw it anyway. Why is your face so sad?”

To that, she has no answer, and then the mother who thought she looks scary comes swooping out of the crowd, gathering the tot up in her arms. “Herald of Andraste! I am so sorry, Your Worship! Jenny can be such a little nuisance.” She babbles excuses as she backs off. The child stares at her with huge brown eyes. Ellana grants her a smile and a wave, then pulls her hood down over her face.

She wishes the woman would leave the child and go away herself. Other than the dwarf, she thinks the child is the only honest person she has met since she fell out of the Fade.


	8. Chapter 8

She finds the Storm Coast aptly named. Her hair lies plastered to her head, long slick strands tangling in the stubble on her temples. She needs to shave, soon, she thinks as she scratches wet locks away from her face. The growing hair threatens to conceal the tips of her vallaslin.

Ellana gets tired quickly, here. The rain fights her fire. She tries to lean more on other magics, but none of them ever come easily to her. She watches Solas sometimes as they battle, feels his barrier spells envelop her like static. It gives her gooseflesh. She wonders if the others notice, if the touch of magic ever feels as intimate to them as it does to her. An extension of someone’s being. Thoughts made real.

_His magic is that of a Keeper_ , she thinks as she calls for more fire. What a Keeper should be: Protective, nurturing, natural. The magic of earth and sky, of growing things. Not like hers, explosive and erratic. She thinks of Leannon, wonders what forces he favours. Wonders if Deshanna has started teaching him yet.

The giant bull-man is jovial enough but offers no word of thanks when the bandits are dead, and immediately admits to being a spy. She hires him anyway. She has already decided to accept aid from those who would give it – she thinks, perhaps, if the Inquisition is diverse enough, they will stop looking to her to fill the hole in their religion. Part of her knows it is a futile hope.

They stay on the coast for a time, establishing presence. During the few moments when the rain holds up long enough to let through a ray of sunshine, it is quite beautiful. She imagines her clan’s aravels as ships, red sails on the horizon.

Where would they go?


	9. Chapter 9

The tree was from her childhood. She had spent one whole summer climbing its branches, and she knew every one of them by heart. Every crack and crevice in its bark was familiar to her fingers. The way the sun filtered through its leaves, a vibrant memory. But it was much bigger here. As she had grown, so had the tree, that she may always seek shelter in its crown.

“It’s beautiful,” he said. “Thank you for showing me this.”

“It’s gone now. Burned,” she sighed. They perched on the highest branch that would bear their weight. Somewhere far away she could hear the sounds of her clan going about their lives. They would leave tomorrow and were packing. (That was from a different time and place than the tree. Then again, so was he. She did not dwell.)

He followed the line of her gaze toward the red sails of the aravels. “Will you introduce me to them?”

The question struck her as strange, even here. He shouldn’t even have been here, and now he wanted something to happen that never happened. “There won’t be time,” she said.

“There is always time here, lethallan.”


	10. Chapter 10

Ellana is too Dalish. She tries not to be, but she can see in Sera’s eyes that she is fooling no one. Her heritage is written on her face in violet ink, Mythal’s branches reaching from the wings of her nose to her temples.

Leaving the Free Marches and travelling to the Conclave, she wore her vallaslin like a shield. It helped to imagine that the tattoos were what drew people’s eyes – not her coloration, not her scars. When the humans called her knife-ear, she tried to think of them as children; uneducated, envious.

But children do not hate the unknown. And anyway, she reflects sourly, she is younger than most of them.

Here in Haven, the only person who seems to truly dislike her difference is another elf. Everyone else sees the Herald first, the Dalish second. “I hope you’re not too elfy,” Sera said when they first met. Ellana knows she is a disappointment, and it makes her a little sad. She tries to think of ways to make it up to her. Ways to be her friend.

Most of the others treat her with mild-mannered respect and deference. Servants and soldiers bow. The Bull is proving quieter than she had thought he would be, and pleasantly forthright. The Warden seems uneasy and keeps to himself – she asks him about the Hero of Ferelden, a Dalish like herself, but he simply says they never met. The Seeker’s need to believe that she is somehow holy frightens her, as does the edge in the Nightingale’s voice. The Commander and the Ambassador hover like friendly spirits; they don’t understand her, she doesn’t understand them, but at least they treat her more like a colleague than a symbol.

She regrets bringing the mage woman, but finds the thought of making her an enemy more worrisome than her presence.

She gravitates back to Solas. She asks him of his journeys and he gives her a pleased look and tells her of spirits befriended, memories discovered. Otherworldly tales that resonate with her in ways that Varric’s rowdy stories never could, enjoyable as she finds them. The cadence of his speech soothes her: Rhythmic, clipped, smooth. Deshanna told stories this way.

But sometimes she says something awkward and Solas responds and she finds herself tangled up in a web of words she does not understand. He looks at her like what they say carries more meaning than she knows. Then she runs away again.


	11. Chapter 11

She didn’t want to go, she knew something terrible would happen. But she went, anyway.

The village was so much bigger than she remembered it, the houses towering around the square, leaning in over her and the Keeper threateningly. It was getting late but there was still a crowd, a hundred faceless humans milling about, constant whispers behind her back.

Then Deshanna disappeared. She always did.

Shadows rose around her. She was so small. She cried for the Keeper, for her mother and father, for her clan. People surrounded her like a wall, their indistinct grins too wide, showing too many teeth. She knew what would happen next. No matter what she did, it always happened the same way. The demons closed in on her. She screamed, called for fire, tried to shield her face.

Then he came walking through the crowd. It turned to mist before him, parting and flowing away. He gathered her into his arms, carried her away. “Hush, da’len, hush. They aren’t real,” he whispered. She didn’t know why he was there, but she clung to him and sobbed gratefully against his chest. They were in his cabin, and she sat on his lap, an unscarred child, and she cried.

“Lethallan,” he said as he stroked her hair. He spoke quietly, as though to himself rather than to her. “What happened to you?”

Not this. This never happened. But this was better.


	12. Chapter 12

Another rift slams shut and she whimpers, staggering and clutching at her wrist. Her palm burns under the mark.

“You alright, Herald?” Varric calls, scrambling down the slope towards her. Is that worry in his voice?

Solas is already at her side, reaching out as if to touch her, but she pulls back. “It’s fine,” she lies. “I’m fine.”

Usually it doesn’t hurt, and she never knows when it will. She wonders if the rifts are different from each other, if perhaps it depends on what sort of demons were pulled through. No doubt, Solas would want to conduct a study.

But she is tired of the attention, of people looking at her like she is broken, damaged. Or dangerous. “I said it’s fine,” she sighs as her companions give her worried glances. “The demons are gone, the rift is closed, I’m fine.”


	13. Chapter 13

Trapped in her own mind, demon curling around her thoughts, pulling, twisting.

She should have gone after Magister Alexius, she thinks, chastising herself. They could have done it. With help from the Tevinter, with the Nightingale’s formidable spies, they could have done it. But she was too frightened, brought up on stories of the terrible things Tevinter Magisters did and do to her kind … she thought perhaps the templars could help.

A boy spirit, confused and confusing, but comforting like a cool touch on a fevered forehead, reminding her who she is.

She could have gone after Magister Alexius, but now she is here, and she will not let envy steal her shape. She will make her mind her own again, and right the wrongs of this twisted creature. This demon.

It strikes her that it must once have been something quite different. She wonders what Solas would do in her stead.


	14. Chapter 14

They fight over her people. Or argue? Or exchange harsh words, perhaps. She isn’t sure what Solas would consider a fight, or what he would name that which transpires between them. For herself, she knows only this: His disdain for the Dalish, his biting sarcasm, cuts far deeper than she could have anticipated. She lashes out, and he reminds her of his superior knowledge.

Ellana stares at him for a moment, struck by the truth of his words. A great tiredness clutches her heart and she bows her head. “Ir abelas, hahren,” she says, repenting. Somehow the act of speaking those words brings relief. When she looks up at him, something has shifted in his expression, his eyes now kind. He accepts her apology and returns it, calling her da’len.

She smiles and excuses herself, having forgotten what it was that she wanted to ask him.

There is a lightness to her step as she climbs a flight of ladders behind the chantry to scale its roof. This is the first time since she left her clan that she has been named da’len. The first time she has met someone she would call hahren. She thinks of Keeper Deshanna, her kind eyes, how wrinkles deepened around her lips when she pursed them in thought. She does not feel sad – wistful, perhaps. She knows in her heart she is never going back; she will have to find a new family, make her own clan. A prospect that she thought impossible but suddenly seems not so far-fetched.

Gazing toward the breach, she touches her scars, runs her fingers over her tattooed cheekbones. She suspects Solas disapproves of her vallaslin, but isn’t sure why. Perhaps she will ask him one day.

He may know much, but Ellana is sure he’s wrong about her people, at least in some respects. She thinks that the Dalish need their stories, that rootless flowers wilt and die. And that perhaps, it doesn’t matter what tales those of the people tell of their past, so long as those tales serve to nurture them in the present.

 _Da’len_ , she thinks. To be a child once more, to answer to no expectations other than to learn. Perhaps it doesn’t matter what the clans teach, but she thinks it matters to Solas what she learns. _I would learn from you, hahren_.

To her, whether he wishes it or not, Solas represents a little sliver of home.

Tomorrow they will seal the breach. She hopes that he will stay, after it is done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> End of Arc One. Thank you for reading, sorry this is a little slow. Next batch should be up soon.


	15. Arc Two

The light was so much brighter than she remembered, the crown of the tree so much larger. She turned her head toward the sun and closed her eyes, feeling golden rays beat down on her face. Deshanna called from somewhere, “Da’len, don’t, your skin burns so easily!”, but she paid her no heed.

Creak of branch, rustle of leaf. His presence brought her out of her reverie. “Lethallan! You’re alive!” His obvious relief shook her as much as his hands clutching her shoulders.

She smiled, bemused. “Should I not be?”

“Tell me where you are!”

His fingers dug into her flesh, his face tense and anxious. She laughed at his silliness.

“I’m right here!”

But here was fading. He cried out for her, “Lethallan!”, and the worry in his voice tugged at her heart. Then all was gone, and replaced with pain.


	16. Chapter 16

Somewhere beyond the fury of the storm there is light. She has to reach it, but she doesn’t remember why. All she can feel, all she can think, is that she is tearing apart. There was a monster she couldn’t fight, and now her hand burns, the pain eclipsing that of her battered body. What are broken bones compared to a bleeding spirit? She prays, but her gods are silent.

Somewhere beyond the snow and ice there is warmth. She remembers warmth in her dreams, but dreams won’t come to her now. Only blackness, until she forces herself out of it and takes a few more staggering steps through the snow. The cold creeps into her bones, an ache so deep that it becomes part of her. She is tired, too tired, and everything hurts, and all she wants is to lie down in the softness at her feet and close her eyes and fall, fall away. Why is she walking? She keeps forgetting.

Somewhere beyond the darkness someone calls for her. Somewhere, they hope she is alive, somewhere, everything depends on her, somewhere … there is somewhere she has to go.

She keeps walking.


	17. Chapter 17

She is alive, and awake. She knows this is real because her scars ache, the way they did when they were fresh. Her shoulder is the worst, and she has to resist the urge to flex it. In the circumstances, however, this is really a minor annoyance.

The Revered Mother’s faith is a physical force; it envelops her, cripples her senses, tries to take away from her what she is, what she was supposed to be. Ellana fends her off, saying this is a burden she must bear alone. There was no touch of the Maker, there was no Andraste in the Fade … and there were none of her own gods either. She accepts that, because she trusts the tales of her people: Fen’Harel tricked her gods and trapped them. They couldn’t be with her, but at least they would want to.

She hopes.

But the Chantry teaches that the Maker turned away from the world, like a disappointed father disinheriting his children, and yet here all these shems kneel before her like she has been touched by anything other than demons. She watches them, her face a mask of stillness she perfected long ago. There is nothing more she can do now. They will not listen. The Anchor burns in her palm and she doesn’t want it and none of them will listen.

Across the camp, Solas stands alone and apart, and his eyes meet hers as her followers sing an unfamiliar hymn. He wears his enigmatic smile, and she lets him be _her_ anchor so that she will not drift away on this sea of music and delusion. At least _he_ doesn’t think she was sent by the dead prophet of an absent god.

Afterwards, he comes to her, for the first time since she woke up. She hopes vaguely for comfort, but he speaks only of their quest. It is just as well, she thinks. To accept comfort, one has admit weakness. She cannot be weak now. However she feels about what the humans believe, she has to stay strong, because it’s not just about them.

She has to be strong, and as she lies down to sleep, she offers a prayer to the Great Protector whose markings she wears. _Please, Mythal, help me_.

Mythal is silent as ever, but the next day, Solas shows her the way forward.


	18. Chapter 18

Skyhold. They give her a sword and a throne and a suite in the highest tower. They give her a title: Inquisitor. Ellana rides fate like a small boat on a quick current, helpless to stop. Her only choice is to follow its course or drown.

Varric brings the Champion of Kirkwall to Skyhold and they speak of Corypheus. Hawke is a hard man, radiating hot controlled anger. She wonders what he was like before he became the Champion; if it is her future she sees in his eyes. She supposes it is a risk she is willing to take. She dedicated herself to Mythal. She was supposed to be Keeper one day.

There is word from her clan, and Ellana’s gut clenches painfully: The rifts are everywhere. The breach may be sealed, but the world is still threatening to rip apart at the seams, and Corypheus won’t stop until he reaches his goal or dies trying. She knew this before, but somehow she never truly realised that the conflict will swallow Keeper Deshanna, cousin Leannon, her clan, everyone. Not until it’s there, ink on paper, in the Keeper’s hand.

It is up to her to stop it. She has to. Even if she thinks, sometimes, that it would be easier to drown. And so she straightens her back, points her eyes at the horizon, and gets to work consolidating power.

She will never be Keeper of her clan, she knows that. But she can try to protect the world they live in.


	19. Chapter 19

“Why is it that you never talk to them?” he wondered.

They were back in her tree, the same day as always. The day before the clan left. She stared at the red sails poking up through the foliage.

She answered, “Because I never did, of course.”


	20. Chapter 20

The mage woman wants her to banish Cole. That alone feels like enough reason to let him stay, even if Solas hadn’t cared, even if she hadn’t cared herself.

Many of the others distrust him, they see only his wrongness, how he doesn’t quite fit in their world. Ellana looks at Cole and sees a fish out of water. Someone trying to press themselves into a mold, find a form that others will find less frightening. She sees difference. She sees herself.

And above all she sees a person who helped her when envy was snapping at her heels, trying to steal her shape. Someone who saved her life.

But that doesn’t matter to someone like Vivienne. She does not tolerate difference, she wants only order. Ellana knows there is no room for one such as herself in Vivienne’s world, not truly, and so whenever the woman calls her ‘my dear’, she has to suppress a snarl. To most people at Skyhold, she is a symbol – to Vivienne, she is a tool.

No one asks her what she wants to be, and she would have no answer for them if they did. She envies Cole’s ability to disappear, to make people forget. No one can make a symbol out of someone they can’t remember. No one can use a tool they can’t see.


	21. Chapter 21

Red lyrium glowing against the snow. There is something almost organic about it; sometimes she thinks she can see it move, writhe within itself. When she unthinkingly reaches out to touch it, Varric pulls her back. She has never seen him so on edge.

They carve a path through the mountain, cutting down red templars with grim determination. She looks at the corpse of some bloated horror and reminds herself that this was once a man. Or a woman. A person, at any rate. It is worse in the Emprise than in Therinfal. The sharp light brings out every terrifying feature. Every last remnant of humanity in the twisted flesh painfully exposed.

She prays silently, lips wrapping around the comforting syllables of the names of her gods, counting them until they become a chant in her mind.

“Shit,” she hears Varric mutter under his breath as they move, as they fight, as they rest. Another kind of prayer. “Shit.”


	22. Chapter 22

“Hahren, is my face sad?”  
  
“Who told you that?”  
  
She pondered. “A child, I think.”

The beach was a crescent curving around a wild empty ocean, stretching into infinity. They walked it together, slowly toward the sunset. Underneath their feet were neither sand nor shingle but millions of little shells, remnants of creatures long dead. They cracked and crunched with every step.

He gave a good-natured snort. “Trust children to speak the truths no one else would dare utter. Yes, da’len, you often look sad.”

“Oh. I’m not sure why.”

They continued in silence for a little while, accompanied by the neverending thunder of the surf. Though they walked just out of reach of the waves, sometimes water lapped at their feet anyway.

“You are different here,” he said. His eyes were on an object further up the beach, something indistinct that seemed never to come closer. The only landmark in an otherwise empty landscape.

Unsure of what he meant, she looked at him, searching for clues in his expression. He made a striking profile against the horizon, sharp and almost predatory. But when he noticed her watching him, the angles of his face softened with his smile.

Suddenly her mouth felt dry and she stopped walking and picked up a seashell, turning it over and over in her fingers. It was pretty, its surface smoothed by the rolling waves, but the edges were chipped. Beautiful but somewhat broken.

He said, “You’re … Less polite. Less guarded. Younger.”

“In Val Royeaux, everyone wears a mask.”

He took her hand, closing her fingers around the little shell by wrapping his own around them. She could feel the edges of the seashell fitting neatly into the grooves of her palm. Like her own, his hands were slim and long-fingered, but they were bigger than hers. They were warm and golden, while hers were pale and cold.

“I understand the need to protect yourself, da’len. Please, know that…”

“What?” she prompted when his voice trailed off.

He smiled, giving his head a small shake, and squeezed her hand. “Let us walk together. Shall we?”

They walked, hand in hand, seashell nestled between their palms.


	23. Chapter 23

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ref: [Once We Were (instrumental)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D93GwkdpDn0)

Ellana’s legs are slim enough to fit between the old wooden boards of the banister, and she dangles them above the Herald’s Rest like a child. Cole perches on the railing next to her, watching the crowd, mumbling his litany of hurts. Two ghosts who aren’t ghosts, watching real people relax.

“I love this song,” she says suddenly as the minstrel plucks the strings of her lute and the first notes of Once We Were rises toward them.

“I know,” Cole says.

She looks up at him, cocking her head. “Feels like she plays it rather often. But … it’s because I’m here, right?”

“Your heart calms. There’s … still sadness, but less strife. Solace.”

Ellana smiles. “When she doesn’t sing the words, when she’s just playing it like this … it reminds me of a song my Keeper used to play.” She closes her eyes, leans her head against the banister. The wood presses into the sides of her forehead. The music hovers crisp and fragile in the air, and the rowdier elements of the crowd are hushed by their brethren until there is only a quiet susurrus of voices.

When the last clear note fades, she opens her eyes to discover dark spots on the grey cloth of her trousers. She has cried, but she is not sure over what. When she looks up, Cole is gone.


	24. Chapter 24

Solas paints frescoes. To her knowledge, he asked no one’s permission, merely moved in and made the rotunda his. When a steward approaches Ellana about it, saying the room might be put to better uses than his painting and his studies, she just laughs.

(In retrospect, she realises that laughing was perhaps a bit unkind, and arranges with Josephine for the steward to receive an apologetic fruit basket. He was only trying to do his job.)

Sometimes when there is a quiet moment where no one seems to want her attention, she sits on his desk and watches him work. The first time, he gave her an inscrutable look over his shoulder and then accepted her presence with a shrug. From then on, he greets her with a smile.

There is a meditative focus to him when he works that is contagious. They do not speak, but sometimes he asks her to hand him a palette knife, clean out a bowl, remove a bucket of dried-up plaster. She complies easily, thinking of a past life. Handing Deshanna herbs that might heal or harm, holding the bowl as the Keeper ground dried leaves into flakes.

The Keeper taught her to mix potions. Solas teaches her to mix pigments.

In time, he allows her to aid him with foundation. In time, he begins to discuss the plans for his designs with her. In time, she dares to make a suggestion or two, and he listens. The golden scales hinting of dragon wings behind Corypheus is her idea. When she watches him carefully gilding the pattern, her heart swells with pride.


	25. Chapter 25

She rose formless through deep dark waters, toward the light. She twirled in a familiar dance, pearly bubbles rising along with her from some unknown depth. Then she breached the surface and her body was solid, rising from the water, feet on the ground. Before her was the forest, and beyond that, the meadow and the mountains.

She stepped out of the water and he was there. This startled her; she was not supposed to meet anyone at this step of her journey. But he was there, and he stared at her new and naked form, nostrils flaring. The light was behind him, his eyes shadowed and dark. She stood at the edge of the still pond, water dripping from her fingers and running in rivulets down her back.

He walked down the slope and stopped just before her, looking down at her face. Then he stepped around her. She felt his eyes leave a burning trail around her body. His breath against her neck when he said her name, every syllable dripping heavily onto her skin. Warm honey.

A tremor went through her; she felt electrified, alive. She grinned, suddenly, wildly, and ran.

He gave chase.

They ran through the forest, her legs stretching for the first time, the same as every time. Elation lengthened her step, she almost flew. Instead of wolves, she could hear his feet hitting the turf right behind her.

He caught her with a flying tackle and she fell forwards through the air, impossibly far. The meadow caught them and they rolled and rolled and then stopped. He hovered above her, she on her back, both of them breathless. There was grass in her hair and the air was fragrant with crushed wildflowers. He leaned in, his face but an inch from hers, outlined sharply against the brilliant sky. A smile played on the corner of his lips, her own parted expectantly.

Then he blinked, shook his head minutely. He said, “No. This … This is wrong. I am sorry.”

And then he was gone, and she had forgotten to look for her wings.


	26. Chapter 26

“Inquisitor!” the dwarf calls as she passes his table in the throne room. Strictly speaking she supposes it isn’t his as such, but like Solas, Varric has made a place for himself. “Do you have a moment?”

She smiles and takes a seat. “Always, Varric. But I wish you weren’t so formal.”

“Well you know, can’t call you Snowy or Nugget out here where everyone can hear us. Would cause a scandal!”

Ellana chuckles and props her chin on her hand. Snowy (because of her hair) and Nugget (because of the lack of hair on her face) were two of the less bizarre nicknames Varric suggested for her when she asked why he gives the others funny nicknames, while she just gets to be Inquisitor. With an expansive, dramatic gesture, he said she ‘defied definition’. And added that Cassandra would have his hide if she caught him being less than proper with the Lady Inquisitor.

“Actually this is sort of exactly what I wanted to talk about,” Varric is saying. “I’m writing some notes about the Dalish clan on the Exalted Plains.”

“Oh?”

“I wanted to make sure I get it right. You being an elf and all, it seems important not to misrepresent your culture in an account of your deeds. If I were to write one. So. When you talked to the Keeper, you called him something. Hare-something?”

She nods. “Hahren.” She spells it out for him and he jots the word down on a scrap of paper. “It’s an … honorific, I suppose you might call it? It means elder.”

“Right. And in turn he called you..?”

“Da’len,” she says with a smile. “Literally, it means ‘little child’.”

“Uh-huh,” Varric says, pen scratching across parchment. “So the terms … establish hierarchy?”

She opens her mouth to protest, but closes it before she speaks, pondering. That isn’t how she would have described it, nor would any elf she has known … but she can see how it makes sense to outsiders. “I guess. Though that is not how we would term it. Hahren denotes respect and deference, because elders are wise and their counsel should be heeded.”

Pausing, she watches Varric write, his brow lightly furrowed in concentration. He has a surprisingly neat hand. Blocky but with some carefully added flourish, much like himself. Soon enough he looks up at her, prompting her to continue with a nod.

“When an elder calls you da’len, they acknowledge that you are of the people, and that it is their duty to nurture and protect you. So … I suppose for a dwarf or a human, that might sound a lot like hierarchy, but to us it is more about family and reciprocal duty. Though I should say, depending on context, da’len is also a term of endearment.” She stares into the fire on the hearth, thinking of the warmth in Keeper Deshanna’s voice.

“You speak like a damned lexicon sometimes,” the dwarf mutters as he writes. Then he sets his pen aside, having finished his note. He arches an eyebrow, smirking. “So-o,” he says, his tone now more teasing than business-like, “When Chuckles calls you da’len, is that because he is your protector, or because he thinks you’re cute?”

A blush springs up on her cheeks and she ducks her head. She has to force herself to remain still in her chair and not shift uneasily. “I named him hahren first,” she says defensively. “He is older than I and … he’s got such enormous wisdom and experience…”

“Sure. Enormous wisdom,” Varric says easily and leans back in his chair. His smirk has turned into a grin, and now she can’t help but squirm. He chuckles, shaking his head. “Hey, take it easy, I’m only teasing. The man is a paragon of propriety, and you no less. I just overheard you talking the other day because, well, I’m right here y’know? I had to ask.”

She gives a tentative nod, chastising herself for her unease. No one has done anything improper, Varric said so himself. She rubs her wrist absent-mindedly, and changes the subject.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ellana's explanation of the terms hahren and da'len is not canonically established afaik, but it's how I interpret how they're used.


	27. Chapter 27

She learns rift magic. A madwoman prompts her, but Solas shows her the way. Together they practise on the ramparts at night, where it is easy to see how the magic of the Fade ripples and twists around their fingers, shimmering in the air around them as they weave and guide it into new shapes – gently, gently.

The boy spirit watches her with sparkling eyes and a smile on his lips. It makes her happy to see Cole happy, just as it makes her proud to see Solas proud.

Sometimes she slips, and there is a stabbing sensation in her chest when Solas frowns at her. He admonishes her to focus, that the forces they are manipulating are much too dangerous and sensitive for her mind to be elsewhere.

She doesn’t tell him that it’s the sight of his broad shoulders outlined against the curling green light that distracts her, nor does she admit that sometimes when he looks into her eyes her breath catches in her throat and she forgets where she is. Instead she takes a few shivering breaths and fastens her eyes on her hands, on the darkening horizon, on anything that isn’t him, and tries to ignore how she can feel the heat of his body like a furnace against her skin every time he steps close to her.

 _What am I doing? Creators, guide me!_ She throws the prayer at the stars, thankful that Cole is so distracted by the shiny that he forgets to read her mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> End of Arc Two.
> 
> (I am obsessed with Solas' shoulders. Also the rest of him. But seriously though. Currently playing a male elf and noticed how much broader Solas' shoulders are than Mahanon's. *swoon*)


	28. Arc Three

He kissed her and

then she wakes up.

It’s morning, the sun just about clawing its way above the mountaintops, its first rays reflected on the glacier and making her eyes water as she paces on her balcony. It was a dream, but it was real. She knows it, she knows that if she talks to him, he will remember it just as well as she does. It was a dream, but _he_ was never of the Fade or her mind, _he_ was truly _there_ , his eyes and his lips, his smile and his scent and the warmth of his skin and she had kissed him because she didn’t realise it was and wasn’t a dream and he had kissed her back even though he must have known, and now she paces, pulling at her hair.

They kissed and it was a dream, and so were all the others, and she never realised that they were also real, because he never said, never told her, never even hinted. Perhaps he thought she knew? But how was she supposed to have known? No one has ever told her this was how it was done. She rages against Deshanna for a moment, then abruptly interrupts herself with the realisation that perhaps Deshanna didn’t know, either. Perhaps it is only because of the Anchor this could even happen.

_I felt the whole world change_. She had felt it too. When his hand closed around her wrist, her course changed. Has he steered her thus knowingly, or are they both adrift, helpless but to follow the current, clinging to each other like driftwood?

And in her mind his words echo: _It isn’t right, not even here_.

She knows she has to talk to him – well, to anyone really, she has to leave her tower at some point, and the thought terrifies her. They will expect her in the war room, on the throne, in the mess, they will expect her to be business as usual because they don’t know her world is standing on its head, and _he_ will be around and she will have to look into his eyes ( _remember to breathe_ ) and at some point … ask.

She paces. She will have to ask him what any of this meant – and that will be alright, won’t it? He likes it when she asks him questions.

She paces, rubbing at her wrist and the vibrant memory of his first touch, and wonders how his approval has come to be more important to her than anything else.


	29. Chapter 29

He needs time to think. There are ‘considerations’.

The kiss lingers in her mind. Just a tentative little peck from her, impulsive and ill-considered and like nothing she has done before. His response, overwhelming passion, washing over her like a wave and retreating as quickly. How hard and lean his body had been as he wrapped his arms around her. She wonders if it would be the same outside of a dream.

She tells him to take all the time he needs. She feigns patience, and wonders if he believes her.


	30. Chapter 30

She was and wasn’t surprised to see him. She had sought him out like this before, she suddenly realised, but this was the first time she did it consciously. This was the Fade reflection of the rotunda, where she found him the other night. She wondered if he had been waiting for her. “I’m still not sure how this works,” she admitted when he looked up and acknowledged her presence with a smile.

“Oh?” he said, remaining in his chair.

She sighed. “I didn’t understand, before. I thought I was just dreaming.”

“You were dreaming.”

“But I didn’t realise you were really there. I thought…”

He blinked, straightening to look at her properly. She felt pinned to the floor by his gaze, feeling the walls around them retreat until they faded into nothing and she was small, so utterly small. Then his sharp features fell into a self-deprecating chuckle and he rubbed his forehead. “Oh, lethallan. Ir abelas! I should have mentioned earlier. I shouldn’t have assumed…” He interrupted himself and turned his head, looking around him. “Are you even aware you’re doing that?”

“I’m doing what?” she said, confused.

“You are a dreamer, lethallan. It is a powerful gift, but it makes you vulnerable – all the more so, given that you didn’t even know!”

“Please, hahren … will you teach me?”

She fidgeted, venturing a smile. He stood and was already before her, his hands squeezing her shoulders reassuringly.

“Of course I will.”


	31. Chapter 31

No one can know, Ellana realises when she wakes up. No one else can know until she is stronger, until she has learned what she can and cannot do. Until she has mastered her gift and feels sure that she doesn’t pose a danger to herself or anyone else. And perhaps not even then.

She asks Solas not to tell anyone, and he laughs gently. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” he says, a twinkle in his eye that she thinks may be his version of a wink.

But what will she do if she cannot learn to control her dreams? Solas conjectures that it is her innocence which has protected her until now: Unaware of her power she has never truly exerted it, and so she never attracted unwanted attention. It is different now, she felt it last night.

“If I lose control…”

“You won’t,” he says with an uncharacteristic lack of caution. He is still smiling. The confidence he exudes makes him look dashing. She wonders how he can be so sure; if he believes in her strength or his own masterful teaching, or if he simply doesn’t want to think of what he might have to do if things go wrong.

It is hard not to get swept up in his enthusiasm. And even harder not to harbour hopes for where it might lead. Soon she gives up trying, focusing instead on trying to soothe the gnawing impatience within her. He is always with her, but even when he is close enough to touch he feels somehow distant. She finds herself frustrated and wanting to scratch at him until he bleeds, to make him open up to her, as she would lay herself bare to him if only he asked.

But there is nothing to do but wait.


	32. Chapter 32

At night, he teaches her to walk the Fade consciously without fear, to interact safely with spirits, to explore her own memories without losing herself in them. If someone were to write a story of their dreamscape meetings, she supposes they could aptly be described as magical. But it is more than mere magic.

During the day, when there is time, they speak of the people, its culture and history. That is to say, he speaks when he has a mind to, and she bites down on her frustration and tries to listen. Most of the time, it is fascinating. Some of the time, it is hurtful. Rarely, she argues. But she keeps coming back to it, asking him his thoughts and opinions on everything from ruins they have visited to tales of the gods that her Keeper taught her.

Now Ellana perches on the wooden scaffold in the rotunda, watching Solas’ hands move as he speaks. For some reason Varric has joined them, complaining of an bunch of Fereldan nobles having brought dogs into the throne room. He’s taken the chair, leaving Solas to lean on his desk.

“What’s this, are you having a party without me?” the Tevinter exclaims, having sauntered down the stairs of the rotunda. Not that Ellana could see his descent, but he saunters everywhere, so she thinks it highly likely.

“I think it was a philosophy lecture, actually, but I’m not sure because half of it was in elvish,” Varric observes wryly. “Could’ve been religion, or history.”

“The three are tightly intertwined. To speak of one, one often has to touch upon another,” Solas points out.

Varric shrugs. “Either way, not enough beer to be a party.”

“I am sorry to have disappointed you, child of the stone,” Solas says in his driest voice. “But then, I was not speaking for your benefit. I was asked a question about Arlathan, and I answered.”

The Tevinter leans casually against the scaffold, but twitches upright when Ellana drops to the floor and lands beside him. “Ah, are we educating our dear Lady Inquisitor? I could present a treatise on Tevinter customs, but somehow I doubt it would be quite as well received…”

She gives him a bland look. “I’m happy to learn about all cultures. Even Tevinter.”

“Ever the diplomat,” Dorian smiles.

What she would really like to know is how much time he spends getting his hair and moustache just perfect every morning, or if he has a spell to do it. But she says nothing, and instead he begins a discussion on veil theory with Solas. She listens quietly while tidying the room of scattered art supplies.


	33. Chapter 33

“Varric, am I supposed to have a beard?”

The question comes as unexpectedly as most of Cole’s utterances, in a lull of conversation after the Iron Bull and Krem left them to settle some matter with a wrestling match. The tavern is full of people, but at their table sit only Ellana, Varric and Cole at this point. Few patrons dare approach the Inquisitor. She doesn’t know if she should be more annoyed that they treat her with undue reverence, or grateful that she doesn’t have to talk to strangers all the time.

Varric blinks at Cole, answering with a bewildered shrug. “Uh. If you want to, I guess you could grow one?”

“Hair is strange,” the boy spirit continues. “Cole had no beard, but he wanted one. You and Blackwall have hair everywhere, but you cut your beard off and he does not. Solas has no hair and no beard.”

“He has eyebrows,” Varric points out.

“Yes! He has eyebrows! Most people have eyebrows ... but not Ellana. Why does she not have eyebrows?”

“I don’t know, she’s right there, why don’t you ask her?”

Cole shakes his head. “She doesn’t like it when people pay attention to her face.”

“No, I really don’t,” Ellana grumbles and ducks, shielding her face with a hand. She wishes her suit had a hood. “So I’d appreciate it if you stopped.”

Cole turns to her, shooting her a confused look. “But I still don’t understand why you don’t have any eyebrows! Can you not grow them?”

“I’d wager she can’t, kid,” Varric says, pulling attention away from her. She relaxes somewhat. “Eyebrows are one of those things that you either have, or you don’t.”

“Like feet?”

Varric sighs, smiling. “Sure. Just like feet.”


	34. Chapter 34

Spirits of wisdom were rare, he had said, and true enough they rarely encountered them, no matter how far they walked the fluctuating lands of the Fade. When they finally met one, Solas’ eyes shone with infectious excitement.

Her soul interacting with spirits in the Beyond was so very different from how it went in the solid world. She could feel how she influenced them, how they fed off her, how they let her wants and desires shape them. Even with Solas guiding her, it was hard not to pollute them.

And now the gentle presence of wisdom began to shift, subtly at first, then more quickly, and it began to feed back into her, and she felt herself stand straighter, swell, laugh … Solas pulled her back, “Easy, da’len. Turn away, now. Walk.”

Only then did she see how the spirit had started mirroring her pride, fuelled by the glee she had felt at finally getting to speak with an embodiment of wisdom.

She walked, shaking, walked and fell, and he held her. “I am so sorry,” she wept. “I, I failed, I should have kept myself in check, I should have … I created a demon!” She searched his face for disappointment, terrified, but he appeared calm and collected, giving nothing away.

“Hush,” he said, squeezing her gently. “The shift was never completed and it is in all likelihood not permanent. With your influence gone, it should go back to the way it was.”

That calmed her somewhat, but she still felt like a failure. She sobbed in his arms, longer than she might have alone. It was easy when he was near, easy to let go, to let him carry the burden of her tears.

Afterwards, she reflected that she should not have been surprised that pride would be her weakness.


	35. Chapter 35

Her letters home are becoming shorter and harder to begin. Ellana stares at the blank paper before her, pen hovering over the inkstand. She has started over once, already, and her conscience gnaws at her. Growing up, paper was scarce. You thought of what you needed to write and planned it out carefully in your mind before you put ink to paper.

In the beginning, her letters to the Keeper were long. She wrote them in a tiny, cramped script to fill every page with her thoughts and observations. But now …

She glances at the discarded draft. His name jumps out at her from the page. She stopped writing when she found herself halfway through writing it again, just one sentence later.

Sighing, she sets the pen down and presses the balls of her hands into her closed eyes. There is so much to write about, so much she should report. But his name threads itself through her accounts, and it seems to her that it must be obvious that her focus has shifted and split. She imagines Deshanna reading her letters and tut-tutting.

She wishes they could speak, instead. At night, her face shielded by darkness and flickering firelight. Then she could tell Deshanna the truth and ask for advice.

The truth.

_I think I’m in love with him, Keeper. What should I do?_

Wind rattles her windows and howls in the rafters. Nights like this, her suite feels larger and lonelier than usual. She pulls the half-written letter toward her and picks up the pen. Turning the page over she writes his name on the back. Solas. Over and over she writes it. Capturing him with ink. Pen carressing the shape of him. Solas, Solas, Solas.


	36. Chapter 36

Ellana has never seen him so angry. In fact, she has never seen him express any emotion this strongly. “Solas,” she whispers as he advances on the hapless human mages, and he turns away, scowling.

Her stomach lurches with the realisation that she has just averted a massacre. She wonders what she would have done, had it been her friend. If someone she cared for had been tortured and killed by people who didn’t know better, would she not have craved revenge? She doesn’t know. All she knows is that in this moment she is terrified of him, of his anger, of what he would have done had she not interrupted him.

Solas leaves. He says he will meet her at Skyhold, but his voice is flat and empty.

There should be relief, but there is none. Instead, one fear is replaced by another: She worries he might not come back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> End of Arc Three. Thank you for sticking with me if you've read this far, I know it's been a bit slow. <3


	37. Arc Four

The rough cloth of his tunic against her fingers as she reaches out and takes hold of his arm is what sticks with her. Oh, it is all burned into her memory – every strange word, every little shift in his expression – but that moment when he shakes his head and turns away from her and she stops him with the lightest of touches … that is what will stand out.

He wants to run away but he wants to stay as well. That much is clear when he turns around, grabs her, presses his lips against hers. She thinks of a human saying, how people will act ‘as if there is no tomorrow’. That is how he kisses her: As if there is no tomorrow, no future, only this moment. And she melts into it, willingly dissolving into his passion.

He tells her he loves her, and leaves.

She remains standing in the balcony doorway until he is gone, leaning against the doorframe in an attempt at looking casual, when in fact she is unsure if her legs will still bear her weight. When she hears the click of the door she sinks to the floor, the doorframe’s sharp edges pressing between her shoulderblades, cold air blasting through her empty room. She hugs her legs to her chest, tries to remember how to breathe.

She is happy he left, wants him to come back, wishes he would stay away, wants to run after him – because in his presence she feels like she is drowning but without him the world has no colour. It is like nothing she has ever felt before and she doesn’t know what to make of it, if she can survive like this.

_Hahren, emma lath_ , she thinks and presses her face against her knees to stop the world from spinning, _I don’t understand. Please help me understand._


	38. Chapter 38

It was different in the Fade. Meeting him there felt natural, like some truth suddenly come to light, simple and undeniable, enveloping them with the certainty that together was the only way to be.

“I am curious about something,” he said as they walked. Trees stood around them like pillars, unfamiliar to her: This was a forest of his imagination, not hers. The light was golden and it made his skin glow.

“What is it?”

“You have no scars here.”

She touched her face. Though she had never considered it before, it seemed obvious now: Of course there were no scars, they had been done to her, made, they were not _of_ her. Why would she carry them here, where she did not have to? “Is that strange?”

“Not at all, I suppose. But why are your eyes red?”

She frowned. “Shouldn’t they be?”

He hummed, looking off into the distance, toward a hint of something large and ancient behind the tree-pillars. “Then they are red because that is how you think of yourself.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Ah, vhenan.” He stopped walking and turned to face her. Around them the world shifted, the forest disappearing. He placed a slender hand along her jaw, lifting her chin, and looked into her eyes. “Your eyes are not red, Ellana, they never have been. They are the colour of the sky just before sunrise. Pink and violet and blue.” He gestured toward the horizon, where snowy mountaintops glowed rose in the first rays of the sun.

They stood together on her balcony and she stared at the familiar vista before her with new eyes. It was distant, cold and craggy, but beautiful. Was this how he saw her? She had been born without colour, like a ghost she had thought, or something that lives in caves, pale and hairless. Now he likened her to a winter’s dawn? Her chest constricted.

“I … I didn’t know.”


	39. Chapter 39

Rift magic comes easy to her, like no other magic ever has. She thinks perhaps it resonates with the power of the dreams, that the Fade clings to her after she walks it with Solas almost every night and remains at her beck and call during the days. Though he remains a distraction at times, it is no longer fraught with anxiety, and she makes fewer mistakes.

It delights her, and not just because of the way Solas looks at her when she completes a complicated weave. She feels as though she has come into her element at last, after searching for so long. Like the creature of an ancient tale her Keeper once told, the tale she returns to in her dreams again and again.

The water creature who would be different, who rose formless through the deep dark waters to walk upon the land, who experienced many strange things on its journey and befriended many creatures, but never found a place to belong – not on the ground with the wolves, not in the trees with the squirrels, not on the meadows with the hares and the halla. When it finally went to the mountains and found wings, it got lost in the endless sky and never found its way back, and when it cries lonesome tears they fall upon the ground like rain.

_Do not try to be what you are not, that way lies only pain_ , Deshanna said, but even as a child Ellana thought she had it wrong. The tale was supposed to be cautionary – and these days, she has a strong suspicion that it is qunari in origin, told by the tamassran to baby iron bulls – but that is not how it settled in her heart. Instead, what she learned was that sometimes when you don’t feel like you belong, it is simply because you haven’t finished your journey, and something wonderful may yet be waiting for you beyond the forest and the mountains.

That is what she thinks of when she draws upon the magic of the Fade and it comes to her like music, like rain and sunshine. _I went to the mountains and I found my wings, Keeper._ No longer merely a mediocre mage with some ancient power accidentally fused to her hand, she is now a dreamer and a rift mage, a force to be reckoned with.

As it becomes apparent, some of the others start treating her with caution (and in some cases, possibly newfound respect). Rift magic is new, untested, untrusted. But Cole says that she makes the world shiny and beautiful when she casts, and Solas looks at her with his gleaming grey eyes and smiles, and that is enough for her.


	40. Chapter 40

Sera demands that they prank her advisors. Ellana stares at her, thoughts racing, and before she knows it she has agreed.

The girl is a whirlwind, blunt and honest but her thoughts twisting so differently from Ellana’s that she hardly knows what she’s supposed to say most of the time. She finds herself admiring her, and perhaps that is why she acquiesces.

Ellana is reminded of something Solas said once; how he envies Sera’s purity of purpose. She teases at the thought as they search the Commander’s office for something prank-worthy. Purity of purpose? Sera flies fast and sharp like an arrow but seems to have no idea what direction she is headed. Though perhaps that is enviable in itself. To simply go, damned be the consequences.

She wonders where Solas would go, what path he wanders that he will not tell her of.

Then Sera interrupts her where she stands with a hand resting forgotten on Cullen’s desk, and she is brought back to the here and now. Shoving a folded up piece of paper under the corner of the desk, Sera looks up at her with sparkling eyes and a wild, infectious grin. She returns it. Perhaps they can be friends, after all.


	41. Chapter 41

She listens to the memories of Corypheus. “Let us see what manner of ‘Herald’ this age has bred,” the crystalline voice snarls. Ellana pauses in her search of the old shrine, grips her staff a little tighter. Part of her thinks Corypheus is right to disdain her and scorn her title. Another part wants to rebel, to rise up and show him … something. Power. Death.

They meet a magister in a cage of magic, a sorrowful old man who pleads for release. She sighs and is about to grant him that least of boons, but when she looks up she meets Solas’ frowning gaze and her mouth snaps shut. This old man has seen Calpernia up close, knows the mind of their enemy like no one else they have talked to, and she would see him dead?

She tells him that he is too useful to kill. His despair crashes over her in waves and she leaves, quickly.

It will haunt her.


	42. Chapter 42

“I’ve been wanting to show you something. I think I finally can.”

She took his hand and the world shifted around them, coalescing into a camp beneath looming cliffs. Brought from her memory, she supposed they were taller and darker than they truly had been, but it hardly mattered. At the edge of the camp, Keeper Deshanna. By Deshanna’s side, herself. A frozen tableau.

This was the first time for her, building a complete dream consciously like this. It took more effort than she had expected, and she had to leave out a lot of detail, leaving the surroundings indistinct and blurred. And she had never dreamt herself, outside herself. It was strange, difficult not to let her shape waver. But she couldn’t be there, couldn’t step into this memory while he was present. She would recognise him, and that would change what happened.

She held on to him as the world came alive before them.

“Are you sure, da’len? You don’t have to go,” the Keeper said, voice gravelly with sadness.

“Yes, I do,” the other Ellana spoke curtly.

(“I didn’t want to,” she whispered to him. “She made it hard.”)

Ellana’s jaw muscles twitched. “Three villages would rather see the fields and forests burn than have us camp in them, and several more won’t trade. Leannon was attacked, just for being a fair-haired elf. You know I can’t stay.” Her eyes swept over the camp, where her kinsmen were packing their things, stowing the aravels and preparing the halla for their journey.

Deshanna placed a hand on her shoulder. “Then let me send you on a quest,” she said in a voice that brooked no disagreement. “I will not have you slink off and live as a drifter. Go to the Conclave at the Temple of Sacred Ashes, where Divine Justinia has called the leaders of mages and templars, to end the war. We should be represented, if only to listen. That, at least, is something worthy of a Keeper’s First.”

“I will do as you say,” Ellana sighed, bowing her head, leaning into Deshanna’s motherly caress with closed eyes.

“Perhaps, once you return, the shemlen’s ire will have abated.”

She shook her head and turned away. “It has been years, hahren,” she said softly. “It will not abate. The stories have grown beyond recognition. I am a monster in their eyes, and Lavellan the clan that harbors it.”

The memory froze, colour slowly leeching out of it.

“So you left?” Solas prompted gently.

Ellana sighed. “I didn’t have the strength to leave right then, but I climbed the cliffs the next morning and watched them go without me. I couldn’t bring myself to bid the others farewell.”

They turned away from the scene and when she faltered, Solas took her to her balcony. She stared at the distant mountains as he slipped his arms around her waist, holding her close.

“I suppose this is my home, now,” she said. To live like the humans, bound to the stone and soil, always returning to the same place. Was it so bad? She didn’t know. It had been good enough for the ancient elves, why should it not suit her? Home was where her clan was. Solas. Varric. Cole. Sera … even the Bull and his Chargers. If they were here, she wouldn’t mind.

She leaned her forehead against his shoulder, took in his scent. It reminded her of furs and forests, wild places and loneliness. If she had been asked to describe it, she would have been at a loss. And yet he was always so real, wherever they met. So solid, so unquestionably there.

“Will you tell me what happened with the humans? Why they think you a monster?”

“You have seen it, I think. The warped version of my dreams, anyway. But some day, I will explain.”


	43. Chapter 43

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reference: [Tracing from Temple Doors](http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Codex_entry:_Tracing_from_Temple_Doors)

_Emma solas him var din'an. Tel garas solasan. Melana en athim las enaste._

“Come not into … a place of pride,” Ellana whispers to herself, staring at the ancient etching. ‘Solas’ has been nothing but his name to her for so long, she almost forgot its meaning. Now it jumps out at her from the weathered rock and fills her with a strange uneasiness that has nothing to do with the temple’s warding spell.

Questions hover at the edges of her mind. Why would parents name their child ‘pride’? Is it even his real name, or a just name he took? And if it was a name he took, why would he name himself ‘pride’?

Asking him would be fruitless. He would simply evade, as he does most queries about his personal history. The implications trouble her enough that she pushes the questions from her mind, willing them to disperse in the dry wind howling through the canyon.

His voice from behind her makes her jump. “...let humility grant favour.”

“Is that what those scribbles say?” the Iron Bull asks, towering like a mountain behind Solas. Next to him, the Warden crosses his arms. The warding spell seems to have further deepened his already permanent scowl.

“Yes. The doors inside,” her voice cracks nervously and she clears her throat, “I want to know what’s behind them. I want to know what was so important to the Venatori that they went and massacred tranquil and took their skulls.” Disgust fills her at the thought and she spits out the words. She has to pause and compose herself.

Solas nods. “We shall have to come back with more shards,” he observes dispassionately. If sharing a name with this ancient place bothers him at all, there is no sign of it.

“After we sort out the Grey Wardens, I hope,” Blackwall rumbles.

“And Orlais. Of course, first things first,” Ellana says and turns back to the inscription. She reaches out and traces it with her finger. _Arrogance became our end._


	44. Chapter 44

A trip to a clothier to take measurements, some shopping for accessories, and they are almost set for the Grand Ball, but Ellana lingers in the market. “What are you looking for?” the Ambassador asks, after she has peered closely at the wares of yet another merchant’s stall and found them wanting.

She tries to decide if there is annoyance in Josephine’s voice, or just curiousity. She finds it difficult to read her face, as though the woman is wearing an Orlesian mask. But she thinks there is kindness in her eyes. “I … I’m looking for a mirror,” she admits. Behind Josephine’s shoulder, she sees Solas turning his head. He is smiling. Her cheeks tingle and she thinks she must be blushing – with her complexion, even a faint blush glows like dawn. She clears her throat. “It doesn’t need to be big but … good. True to colour. Not … not copper or something like that.”

“Oh!” Josephine exclaims. “I know just the place.”

She leads them toward a street full of higher class shops, making light conversation as they walk. Ellana is struck by the realisation that this small stream of babble is a skill, one that the Ambassador has learned so well that she could probably keep it up in her sleep. Just like she can talk and write letters at the same time. Ellana thinks mastering magic is probably easier.

“Are personal mirrors common among your people?”

Suddenly expected to speak, Ellana starts slightly. “Oh, well, no. They are a luxury, and we try to travel light.”

Josephine nods. She points at a small shop full of glittering trinkets. “There, I think you will find what you are looking for.” She suddenly smiles at her. “I know it.”

And she does. It is a perfect little thing, glass and silver. The curving filigree pattern of the frame reminds her of halla horns. She looks it over carefully, but doesn’t angle it toward her face. When the merchant realises who she is (after some prompting by her Ambassador), he tries to give the mirror away, but she pays him double its worth. Money is nothing to her. He is giving her her face.

She wraps it in silk and doesn’t take it out of her purse until she is back at Skyhold. Alone on her balcony, she looks into her own eyes.

Solas spoke the truth: They are not red. She isn’t even sure why she thought they would be.


	45. Chapter 45

She dances, and an empire pivots around her.

They dance, and for a moment they are the centre of the world.


	46. Chapter 46

A knock on the door wakes her up. She answers it groggily before she even knows where she is, and Solas enters. Sitting upright in one sudden motion, she clutches confusedly at the silk sheet slithering off her body. She manages to catch it before her chest is bared. But he is staring at her shoulder.

“I apologise,” he says somewhat haltingly, “I assumed you were awake. It is nearly noon.”

Behind him, in the hallway outside the open door, she can see the ornate pauldron of an imperial guard. It shines brightly in the midday sun, and shifts as the guard begins to turn. “Please close the door,” she says weakly.

He complies. The room goes dark for a few moments, until he pulls a heavy curtain from one of the windows and daylight bounces off the marble floor. The guest rooms of the Winter Palace are as lavishly decorated as the rest of it, every surface polished to a gleam. Ellana sits in a sea of silk surrounded by a gilded bedframe and feels terribly out of place. Her eyes are raw with sleep and her hair is a coarse mess, and now he is looking at her again.

He steps closer. “Are you in pain?” he asks quietly.

She glances at her right shoulder. That is where the worst of her scars are, and this morning they are livid, the surrounding skin an angry red. She fights the urge to cover up. What he has seen, he cannot unsee, and she has no wish to hide from him, not truly. “Not usually,” she sighs. “They itch, though. I scratch them in my sleep sometimes and they get inflamed.”

“Maybe I can do something.”

“Keeper Deshanna already–”

“Please, vhenan. Let me try.”

He sits at the edge of the bed and gently pushes her back onto the mattress. Magic flows from his hands into her body and back. She has never enjoyed healing; it feels to her like an invasion, something far too intimate. He is inside of her, sensing something of her that she cannot even see herself, changing her in ways she doesn’t understand. She feels her flesh loosen and reknit underneath his touch and has to suppress a shiver. This was never her magic.

It lasts but a few moments. Then he exhales slowly. “The scars are magical in origin, it’s difficult … but I think they should trouble you less, now.”

His hand still rests on her shoulder. Where the scar tissue is thickest, she can barely feel it. But he slides it down her arm, and where her skin is whole it comes alive to his touch, burning. She looks up at him, the shape of his face outlined against the bright window.

_Grass in her hair; the scent of crushed wildflowers; a brilliant sky. Naked underneath him._

That, too, had been real. A blush starts at her throat and works its way down and up and she pulls at her sheets, trying to cover more of herself, turning her head to the side so she doesn’t have to look at him and to get away from his piercing gaze. Her skin is tingling, unfamiliar feelings clenching her chest, churning her stomach. Her body suddenly much too aware of his presence.

“Da’len..?” he says, wonderingly. A moment later his hand is on her chin and she lets him turn her head to face him again, his eyes pinning her against the pillows. They stare at each other for long breathless moments. Then: “Ah.” He gives her a cryptic smile and releases her, sitting back up. Soon he stands, walking over to the window, his back turned to give her some privacy.

She breathes out, tension leaving her with a tremble. Relief battles with an uncomfortable sense of regret. She rubs her arm, undecided whether she is trying to wipe away any lingering trace of his caress, or recreate it.

“As I said,” Solas says, tone now light and conversational, “it is nearly noon. Now that Orlais is stable, Cullen is anxious to oversee the movement of our troops to Adamant. When you didn’t show up for breakfast … I volunteered to look for you.”

Ellana wraps the sheet around her and walks over to a dresser, where fastidious servants seem to have put away her clothes despite her telling them to just leave her things alone. She clears her throat, rubbing absent-mindedly at the freshly rehealed scars. They do feel less tight, less uncomfortable, and they no longer contrast quite as sharply against her pale skin. “I’m sorry,” she says as she rummages through the dresser, looking for her smallclothes. “I guess I overslept. The ball was … really tiring.”

He chuckles. “You really didn’t like it much, did you?”

“It was … difficult. Before they knew who I was, they called me rabbit and knife-ear. Even to my face. I mean, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but … I never had to deal with humans much until they thought I was the Herald of their prophet. And then to find myself in a palace full of nobles and having to prove to them I’m not some wild savage…”

“You handled yourself exceptionally well. I heard several people extolling how polite and well-spoken you were. Sophisticated, they said!”

She snorts, lips twisting into a sardonic smile. “I should be. I’ve practised for years.” Sighing, she pulls her coat over her shoulders. It feels good to be out of the fancy silks and back in her usual attire. She runs her hands over the worn leather, wondering if perhaps she ought to have a new one made soon. This one is starting to look every bit as savage as the nobles had expected her to be. “With a face like mine, you have to work hard to be viewed as a person, not a freak.”

Solas glances over his shoulder and turns when he sees that she is dressed. “Ellana, you’re not–”

“Anyway, it was Josephine and Leliana who taught me to dance. Literally and figuratively. The credit for last night’s success really should go to them.”

He shakes his head. “Humility is a noble trait, but as you have seen, nobility is not necessarily worth aspiring to. Yesterday, you worked a miracle. Because of you, an elf is now officially recognised as Orlesian nobility! Do not sell yourself short. You danced beautifully. Before the court … and on the balcony.”

She looks down, smiling faintly. _Focus on what’s in front of you_ , he had said, and then demanded, _Dance with me_. Perhaps, had this been a dream, she would have dared to tell him how that had made the whole ordeal seem worth it. Those few moments of surrender, to the music and to him. Of throwing caution to the wind and doing exactly what she most longed to do. He had been an excellent dancer.

Instead she says, “Thank you. I’m sorry for stepping on your toes, though.”

“That is quite alright,” he chuckles. “You were tired.”

“I just … I wish I could’ve danced with you the way I danced with Florienne. In front of everyone.” She starts packing her things with irritated efficiency. “They introduced you as my servant!”

Soft footfalls on marble, his hand on her arm. She pauses, looks up at him. He is smiling. “Ma vhenan,” he says quietly and touches her cheek – the left one, the one with fewer scars to interrupt his caress. “Do you really care what _they_ think?”

She gazes at him for a moment, then sighs as he wraps his arms around her. “No,” she whispers against his throat, leaning into his embrace. “No I don’t. Emma lath, thank you for dancing with me.”

“It was my pleasure.”


	47. Chapter 47

She rose formless through deep dark waters, and this time when she reached the shore she was ready for him. She came out of the pond dry and dressed. He was standing at the edge of the forest, and came to meet her with a smile.

“This is one of my oldest dreams,” she said guardedly. “I don’t know why you’re here. You have seen all there is to it.”

For just a moment, he seemed somewhat taken aback. He raised an eyebrow slightly and said, “I am sorry if I intrude where I am not wanted, lethallan.”

“No! It’s alright,” she said. She felt his eyes on her and shifted from foot to foot. This forest was for running. Her entire being ached to make the journey of this dream as she had so many times before, but he was in the way, invading with associations and memories that had no place here. They made her tingle, ache for something entirely different. She pulled at the simple, formless garment that shielded her nakedess from him. “Tell me … when last you saw me here … why did you chase me?”

He gave a short and sudden laugh. It rasped against her skin, made her itch. She couldn’t tell if it was mocking or kind, or merely a little patronising. He turned and started walking toward the forest. “Isn’t that obvious?” he called over his shoulder.

Frowning, she followed him. “Nothing is ever obvious with you,” she said, but he ignored her and kept walking. He wasn’t moving quickly, and yet he was just out of reach even when she lengthened her step. “Please, wait.”

Suddenly he was behind her. She stopped, breath catching in her throat. He chuckled quietly, nothing but fondness in his voice now. The sound of it made something in her quiver. She felt his fingertips on her bare upper arms, the warmth of his lips against her ear. “I chased you,” he whispered, “because I wanted you. I chased you because you ran.”

Slowly she exhaled, shivering. The forest was before her, and beyond that, the meadow and the mountains. Behind her, a hunter. Tension in the air, no longer tinged with anxiousness, merely expectant. She grinned, suddenly, wildly, and ran.

Perhaps she had never been meant to reach her wings alone. Or perhaps the journey was the destination.


	48. Chapter 48

The desert glitters with campfires, stars blazing in the sky above. Just one short day’s march from Adamant, Ellana sits on a rocky outcrop, watching the twinkling view. She has washed the dust from her hair and now she twists thick strands between her fingers, working faintly fragrant oil into them before pulling them back over her head.

The air hums with the sound of a thousand soldiers trying to make as little noise as possible. The Inquisition army. Her army. She sighs. How did this happen? What strange, twisting paths fate has taken her, that now she has an army at her command, that Kings and Empresses call her ‘ally’. Her, a Dalish elf, a knife-ear, a nobody.

“What are you thinking about?” comes Solas’ voice from the darkness behind her. Without a sound he has climbed the rocks and now he stands beside her. She glances up at him; he makes a dark outline against the stars.

“The power at my command. I never asked for this, never imagined myself a leader of anything other than my people, my clan.”

“That, lethallan,” he says and sits down next to her, “is why you are fit to wield it. Because although your Inquisition now holds in its hands the fate of nations, indeed the entire world, you are still thinking of your clan.”

“Varric told me once that if I really want to protect people, I must understand them first, be one of them. Maybe that’s what he meant. When all I wanted was to keep to myself, seal the breach and go home, he said I should make friends … I made the Inquisition my clan. That’s why I can’t turn away.”

Solas huffs, a noise half-way between surprised and impressed. “Indeed? The durgen’len is wiser than he lets on.”

Finished with her hair, she rubs the last remnants of oil into her skin, smoothing it over her hands and face. The desert air makes her feel raw and brittle. She can feel Solas watching her, and wonders briefly what she looks like in the dark, before her mind turns back to anxious fretting.

“Are you worried about the battle to come?” he asks.

Ellana shuffles closer to him and leans rests her head on his shoulder. It’s not particularly comfortable; Solas is angular, hard, sinewy. But his presence soothes her.

“Yes. No. I don’t know. It seems useless to worry about things that must be done. But I know that people will die tomorrow, for the Inquisition, for me. Most of them will be people I have never known, never met, and I worry that I don’t care enough. And then … there’s my friends, there’s you. And I can’t even begin to imagine…” Her throat constricts around the words. She fights for breath, exhales in a shuddering sigh. “Can a leader really afford to care more about some of her followers than others? Is that fair?”

He slips is arm around her, drawing her close. “No, it isn’t fair. But it is what people do. No matter how big your heart, you cannot care equally for everyone. The only way would be not caring at all, and that would be far worse. So you let the deaths of those few you truly love be a symbol. You fight for them, and in doing so you fight for everyone.”

“They think I’m the Herald of Andraste. If they knew how much doubt I carry…”

“My heart,” he says and turns to face her, placing a hand upon her cheek. His eyes glitter; a hundred campfires and a million stars on the surface of a pond. She drowns in him, drinks his words like something parched, like the flowers wilting on the sun-scorched ground of this gods-forsaken place. “This doubt you feel, the questions you ask and the scrutiny you put yourself under … That is what makes you worthy.”


	49. Chapter 49

There was no Andraste in the Beyond. She has always known, of course, but now she remembers, and now at least some of her companions have seen the truth as well. She tries to find a measure of relief in the jumble of emotions that followed her out of that dark realm, but there is none. Only more questions.

Cassandra staggers, and Ellana watches sadly as the warrior squares her shoulders to bear the burden of her shaken faith. Cole is distraught and desperate, haunting her with his pain and his fear of himself. She brings Varric the news of Hawke’s death; he pretends not to cry and she wraps her arms around him in quiet sympathy. Skyhold reels, but for herself, Ellana feels only frustration.

As always, she seeks out Solas, though they walk the battlements instead of the Fade. She does not want to dream right now, if she can avoid it. But his company brings her no comfort: His fascination with their journey only serves to turn her frustration into anger. And the fact that she doesn’t even understand why, where this anger comes from, just fuels the fire. So she says nothing, Solas filling her uneasy silence with conjecture.

“There was no tombstone for you,” he says, peering at her curiously.

She leans her elbows against the cold stone of a merlon and stares at the sky. Eventually the quiet sucks an answer from her lips. “I think there was. It just … wasn’t mine.”

Solas considers her words for a time, humming. Then he chuckles, shaking his head. “Ah, of course. As First … The graveyard itself was your tombstone. Your deepest fear.” Somehow he seems delighted, as though he has just solved an amusing puzzle. She wants to hit him.

“Exactly how is that funny?!” she snaps, shooting him an angry glance. He appears not to notice.

“The degree to which you identify with your calling to be a Keeper, your dedication to the ‘Great Protector’…”

She draws herself up, glaring at him, daring him to continue mocking her faith. He falters. She thinks this must be the first time this has happened, a strange reversal of roles. So often when they talk she finds herself guarding her tongue, watching his face for every sign of approval or the lack thereof. So often does she hesitate to speak her mind for fear that he might come to think her stupid. Now, she makes _him_ quiet by the sheer force of her anger. After a few moments’ pause, he averts his eyes.

“Ir abelas, vhenan,” he says softly, voice laden with regret. “I realise this journey was not easy for you.”

Ellana sighs, turning back to face the view. It is hard to stay angry with him when he looks so … sad. She thinks of the tombstone bearing his name, wants to tell him that his fear won’t come to pass as long as she lives. She believes it, too. But she knows he won’t.

They stand together, watching the sun’s journey toward jagged mountaintops cutting the horizon like teeth. A view so familiar, suddenly become threatening. After some time, she speaks. “I keep waiting for, I don’t know what, for a sense of normalcy? For the world to stop spinning for a while, to start making sense. But every step I take, big or small, just leads to more questions, more confusion.” She rubs her hands together as she speaks, pressing a knuckle into her aching palm. “I’m tired, Solas. Just … tired.”

He takes her hand in his, and she suffers him to run his thumb over the mark.

“Does it hurt?”

“It wasn’t so bad, before. It got worse when Corypheus tried to take it back. And since we walked the Fade … I feel it all the time.”

“I’m sorry.”


	50. Chapter 50

Waves like thunder in slanting sunlight, plumes of seafoam scattering in the breeze.

She couldn’t find him. It happened, sometimes, and she had learned not to worry. Without him, she felt naked and vulnerable, but at the same time she found it interesting to walk the Fade alone and see its wonders with her own eyes, uncoloured by his perception, his expectations, his nudging questions.

Now she stood on the endless beach by the endless ocean. She remembered this place, she had met him here once before she knew … before she awakened. Waves crashed and ground against the shore, the empty shells of millions of forgotten creatures tumbling in the surf, but never would any driftwood or seaweed wash ashore. The sun made its way toward the horizon, ever sinking, but never would it set.

In the palm of her hand rested a small seashell. She turned it over and over in her fingers, ran her thumb along smooth white curves, felt the chipped edges with her nail. Beautiful, but somewhat broken. She squeezed it in her fist, gazing at the Black City hovering like a mirage in the distance, marring the perfect cerulean sky.

Then she brought her hand back and threw the shell into the ocean, where it joined its brethren in that endless rolling dance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> End of Arc Four.


	51. Arc Five

Ellana Lavellan keeps going. The Inquisition has grown to proportions she could never have imagined, and it has been suggested to her by one or two of her companions that she might take a different approach to being Inquisitor now. Less front-line, more overseeing. But no matter how much Skyhold has come to seem like home to her, it never takes long until she itches to see something else, something new. And there is so much to do.

So she keeps going. They need to rebuild their army after the losses sustained at Adamant and grow the ranks before the next battle, they need to patch the holes in Leliana’s web of spies, they need to increase influence among nobility and common folk alike. Every time she gets back to Skyhold after a completed mission, there is another reason for her to leave, another reason to bring some of her trusted friends and head out into the world.

And though she tells herself she does it because it is the right thing to do, because she has the Anchor, because she is the protector, the Keeper, the Inquisitor … though her conviction in that regard has not lessened the least, she cannot lie to herself. She enjoys the adventure, the danger.

She keeps going, with Solas always at her side. They work together seamlessly now, unleashing supporting and complimentary magics on their enemies, staves whirling in an ever deadlier dance. Formidable in combat, inseparable at rest.

She knows what it looks like, she knows people whisper behind their backs, and it doesn’t bother her in the least. Never has she cared less what people think. In fact, it amuses her to wonder what they would say if they knew of their nightly dreamwalks. It is liberating, somehow, that the only person whose opinion she truly cares about anymore is his. Even if, sometimes, there is a gnawing doubt in her mind, gentle words of caution – often in the voice of Deshanna – that she shouldn’t lose herself in him completely. That there is too much at stake, and she is allowing him too much influence, allowing him to become too important.

But that is only when they are apart, and the moment she hears his voice, the inner one is silent and forgotten.


	52. Chapter 52

“By the way, and I wasn’t going to mention it because it is really quite ridiculous, but…”

“Get to the point, Josephine.”

“I received a letter from Vicomtesse de Brillat, whom considers herself a personal friend of mine.” The Ambassador sounds amused. She takes a sip of her wine before continuing. “She was tremendously excited to relay to me what she believes to be most scandalous information. Apparently, you were seen, ah, _fraternising_ with a _servant_ at the grand ball.” Her eyes roll dramatically at each sarcastic emphasis.

Ellana snorts, unable to see the humour in people sticking their nose in her private business. “I danced with Solas, if that’s what she means.”

“Indeed,” Josephine nods.

“Maybe if he hadn’t been introduced as my _serving man_ ,” Ellana can’t help the acid note creeping into her voice as she raises an eyebrow pointedly at the Ambassador, “people wouldn’t see fit to gossip about it.”

Josephine straightens her back, her face settling into a mask of formality. “My Lady, introductions were agreed upon beforehand with everyone in attendance. Solas wanted no attention drawn to him. Anyway,” she adds with a sigh, “these things are to be expected, and I doubt it would have mattered who you danced with or what their title was. People will talk. It’s nothing to worry about.”

Ellana glances at her. “Fine,” she says curtly. She feels bad about it, somehow, like she is punishing Josephine for something that probably wasn’t her fault. The woman invites her for wine and a chat, a less dreary way to wrap up the business of Halamshiral and Adamant than the usual meetings and paperwork, and this is how she repays her? But she can’t help it – the Ambassador is probably a lovely person, Ellana just hates everything she stands for. And some part of her finds it hurtful that Josephine apparently thought she would find it amusing to know that people gossip about her relationship with Solas. Nevertheless, she sighs and adds in a softer tone, “That’s alright, then.”

“If I might ask … and I understand if you don’t want me intruding. I am simply curious. You and Solas … What is the nature of your relationship?”

“Is this the Ambassador Montilyet of the Inquisition asking, or Josephine?”

“Just me,” Josephine says, blushing faintly.

“Alright … I’m not sure what to tell you, really. Solas is…” She grows quiet, staring into the fire. Josephine says nothing, instead reaching to refill their goblets.

What is Solas to her, or she to him? She considers Varric’s stories, the ones he says are terrible and she finds secretly thrilling, but there is nothing in them that gives her the words she needs. _He is the Keeper of my heart_ , she wants to say. But that is not something Antivan nobility would understand. _He is the man of my dreams_ , she would continue. But that means nothing to anyone but her and Solas.

Eventually she gives up, sighing softly and shaking her head. Josephine watches her, a small smile playing on her lips. “I see. Well, in any case, I hardly think anyone can fault you for seeking the company of your own kind.”

“Oh, plenty of people already do. Cassandra, for one.”

Josephine raises her eyebrows. “Truly?”

“She’s suspicious of most of my friends. I don’t think she trusts anyone who … doesn’t look like her.”

“She trusts you.”

Shaking her head, Ellana swirls her wine, staring into her cup. In the muted light of candles and fireplace, the wine looks like blood, thick and dark. “She has faith in me,” she says. “Not the same thing. Had I not fallen out of the Fade when I did, had it not been for the Anchor, I would just be another elf to her. And a mage, to boot.” She takes another sip of wine; it’s rich and spicy and definitely not blood. She wonders if it’s Antivan, it seems like it would fit. Then she almost laughs at herself – when did she start enjoying wine?

“That’s … a little harsh,” Josephine is saying.

“Harsh words for a harsh woman. Please, don’t misunderstand, I have great respect for her.”

Josephine clears her throat, setting her wine aside and folding her hands in her lap. “Do you think maybe you tend to judge people on their looks as well?”

The evening ends soon thereafter with strained pleasantries.


	53. Chapter 53

“I’m still finding it difficult to tell, sometimes,” she said and looked around her room. Forgotten and possibly imaginary details swam into focus before her eyes. Did she really own that book, or did she only wish she did?

Solas hummed inquiringly. He was running his fingers along her back, following the lines of her shoulderblades, her spine, the little dimples above her behind. She could feel her feet disappearing underneath the mound of pillows at the head of the bed. Apparently, at some point, they had gotten turned around.

She explained, “I think this is a dream, but sometimes I’m not so sure. You make it so … real.”

“It is real,” he chastised gently.

“You know what I mean. For instance, why do we get tired?”

There was that faint look of delight on his face that made something inside her swell with pride and quiver with happiness. Never had she met someone who so enjoyed her thinking about things, asking questions. Not even Deshanna. Being with him made her try harder than she ever had before to be better, smarter, wiser.

He said, “Because our minds remember how our bodies work and, so long as we do not think about it, act as if they are really here.”

She lifted her hand, stared at it as she flexed her fingers. “So if we do think about it…”

“Indeed. Since we are dreaming consciously, there are many, many other … interesting possibilities.”

The corner of his lips curled in a smirk and she felt a hot blush rise from her throat to her temples. She smiled and took the bait. “…like what?”


	54. Chapter 54

He could have been a person, but he is a spirit. They are both wrong, and both right. Ellana sighs quietly.

These people are her clan, her family – and just like a family, they fight. Watching Solas and Varric pull at the poor boy spirit, wills clashing against each other like swords, neither of them stopping to consider Cole as he actually is. Like parents, trying to imprint their wishes on a growing child, to steer his course.

“He could have been a person,” Varric mutters, and Solas disagrees, and Ellana wants to bang their heads together and tell them that Cole _is_ a person. He is a person _and_ a spirit, just like she is a person _and_ an elf. What makes it all the worse is that she knows that Solas _knows_ this. He was the one who taught her, after all. And yet here he is, arguing with Varric as though there is some sort of dichotomy.

She leaves them and finds Cole in his usual haunt. She sits with him, dangling her legs over the tavern and letting her thoughts drift to the music. She thinks she can feel him riding them sometimes, gently along the surface like a leaf on a pond, and knows she should dislike it but somehow she doesn’t mind this strange sort of intimacy. She thinks, in a way, it is what everyone dreams of: Someone who actually knows what they are thinking.

Sometimes when she feels him there, sifting through her anxiousness, her fears and hurts, she thinks of sweet and silly things just to make him smile.


	55. Chapter 55

“Ooh, ni-ice,” Sera’s voice echoes through the ravine from somewhere below her.

Ellana grunts as she climbs another rung. One thing she has learned from her adventures is that though she always loved climbing trees and cliffs, she hates ladders with a passion. All of the work, none of the fun. “Just what about any of this could possibly be described as ‘nice’?”

“Nuthin’,” Sera replies innocently.

“I believe she may be referring to the view,” Solas interjects from further down.

“You know it, elfy!”

There is the unmistakable hint of an amused smirk in Solas’ voice. “Well in that case, I can only agree.”

“The view? What view?” Ellana twists her head to look down and sees the upturned faces of Sera, just behind her on the ladder, and Solas on the platform beneath. “I– what– hey!”

“Haha! Too easy!”

She hurries up the ladder, chased by Sera’s delighted laughter. What really galls her, however, is how she hears Cassandra stifling a snigger above her. So much for being paragons of propriety.


	56. Chapter 56

He finds her curled up on her bed.

It’s an enormous four-poster in the Free Marcher noble style, something she indulged the Ambassador after she refused numerous Orlesian bedframes. In truth she would have been happy with a hammock, but Josephine insisted the Inquisitor’s living space must reflect her status. Ellana doesn’t understand it. No one ever comes into her apartment unbidden, so what does it matter how she sleeps? She grabs a pillow and throws it angrily across the room. It lands harmlessly on the floor.

Everything here is wrong. What is most wrong is Ellana. She shouldn’t be here, stuck in a tower when halfway across Thedas–

She notices Solas and quickly wipes at her eyes.

“Is something the matter?”

She has never heard him say something so stupid. Turning away from him, she sits at the edge of her bed with her back towards him. “What are you doing here?” she asks flatly.

He moves across the room, the much too large and much too beautiful room that is hers and where no one ever comes. “Leliana asked that I pay you a visit. She said something happened and you left the war table in the middle of deliberations.”

So he didn’t come because he wanted to but because someone else asked him. At least he is honest about it. She tries to be upset with him, but then she thinks of the letter on the table; the Keeper’s neat but spidery hand; warnings; reports from Wycome. She buries her face in her hands. “It’s my fault. It’s all my fault,” she whispers. “And they’re so far away. I can’t save them.”

“Your clan.” He sits down next to her, but doesn’t touch her. “I’m told they’re under threat?”

She nods.

“And you believe this is your fault.”

“The shems have been looking for an excuse to get at clan Lavellan for ages. Because of me. Because of what they think I did. I thought it would get better when I disappeared, but…”

He places a hand on her shoulder. She almost twitches at the touch, his presence made somehow real, irrefutable proof that she is in fact not alone, however much she feels like it. She wants him to go away, leave her with her fear. Instead he strokes her back gently. “I think it’s time you told me what happened.”

Ellana is quiet for a long time. Perhaps he will go away? But he just sits there, hand moving slowly over her back. She knows he is looking at her, can feel his eyes trying to pry her hands away from her face. Eventually she takes a shuddering breath and lets them drop into her lap. Haltingly, she tells him, as briefly as she can.

It was years ago, the very first time she visited a human village with Keeper Deshanna, as her First. Details of the memory are blurred, warped by her nightmares, but she remembered how the humans stared at her and whispered behind her back. Deshanna told her not to mind, to be still, cool like water.

Something had happened while they were there. There was a demon in the village. The Keeper had gone to negotiate trade and safe passage for their clan with the mayor, and Ellana had been on her own when the monster erupted from the shadows.

“I don’t remember much,” she says. “It was dark by then, I think. There were a couple of children … I tried to protect them. I was mauled … I fought. I think I defeated it. I lost a lot of blood. There were people around me, they were angry. The children were dead, I think. Blood everywhere. Then … then I was back with my clan. Deshanna must have carried me.”

After a moment’s silence, Solas quietly says, “The humans blamed you for what happened. Because you were an elf and a mage, because you looked different.”

In that acknowledgement, that immediate understanding, she finds solace. Tension leaves her and she sags, leaning against him. Tears begin to flow. “I don’t know why the demon was there, I don’t know who or what pulled it through. For all I know it _was_ me,” she sobs. “The clan had to leave the area. We laid low for a while but it didn’t help. Rumours started, spread from village to village. I was the ghost-like knife-ear who had called a demon to capture their children for my blood magic. Then I _was_ the demon. And now … now my people are trapped between the rifts and the shems. The Duke of Wycome is using Lavellan as a scapegoat for some disease, just as they have been used as a scapegoat for everything else that has gone wrong for the humans ever since that day.”

She breaks apart, falling into his lap, heaving sobs wracking her body. “And I can’t save them! I’m too far away! I was supposed to be their protector, I was supposed to be their Keeper, but I’m too far away and now they will be destroyed because of me!”

Solas sits quietly stroking her hair as she babbles her grief and wets his tunic with her tears. When her sobs finally abate and she lies exhausted, he helps her sit back up, and cups her face with his hands, wiping tears from her cheeks. She tries to look away, but he captures her gaze with his own.

“You do not know that it is your fault, da’len,” he says. He smiles wryly and adds, “A lot of things revolve around you, but this is probably not one of them.”

“How can you be so sure?” she asks. The tremor in her voice embarrasses her, it makes her sound like she is closer to five than twenty five. But then, she has just spent the better part of an hour crying like a child, feeling sorry for herself.

“I cannot. But history is rife with examples of humans blaming elves, and elves blaming humans, for every concievable ill that befalls them. If you were not who you are, if you hadn’t even existed, clan Lavellan would likely still find itself in this bind. Only, then, they would have no Inquisitor to turn to. You cannot go to them yourself, but the Inquisition has people in the area. You can still protect them. But not here, not like this.”

He means not in her bed, crying like a baby. She gives a shuddering sigh and looks down. He lets her escape his eyes, but keeps a hand on her cheek, thumb running gently over the scarred skin. “You shame me, hahren,” she mumbles.

Solas chuckles softly. “Listen to me, da’len. If you would protect your people, you must learn to set your feelings aside when it is needed. If shame helps you, then feel ashamed. If not, then do not. But you _will_ go back down to the war room and speak with your advisors. You _will_ devise a way to save your clan.”

“Yes, Solas,” she sighs, relaxing. She accepts his chastisement placidly, her embarrassment draining away, leaving relief in its wake.

She closes her eyes, taking a few deep breaths. To go down there, to face her advisors after she stormed out … but it will be alright. She knows them well enough by now to know that they will act as if nothing happened. Perhaps, one of them will inquire afterwards if she is well. And she will be. Solas has told her exactly what she needed to hear, exactly when she needed to hear it. She rises, straightening her clothes.

“Ma serannas, emma lath,” she says, and keeps the smile he grants her in her heart as she walks down the stairs to once more face the world as the Inquisitor.


	57. Chapter 57

Sometimes, without warning, sadness came over him.

They would be sitting somewhere, observing the dream around them, discussing something – or walking, traversing the shifting vistas of the Fade while letting the sheer familiarity of movement anchor their minds. And they would come across something, an idea or a thought or a detail in their surroundings, and suddenly his eyes grew sad and distant.

She wasn’t sure if he knew that she noticed. The first times it happened, she asked him about it. But when she tried to help carry his pain like he often carried hers, he would turn away, shut her out. Instead she learned to ask him something, anything, to steer his mind away from whatever darkness enveloped it at these times.

And then he would blink and smile at her, call her his heart, kiss her … and move on.

There were other times, however, when it was her he looked at so sadly. Then, terror gripped her heart, and she hastened to wake up.


	58. Chapter 58

The Tevinter considers her a friend. The confession takes her aback and she stammers awkwardly. Then the moment has passed, and he suggests drinking.

Dorian. His name is Dorian, not ‘the Tevinter’, and she feels embarrassed now. Handsome, self-assured, suave and utterly _human_ , she has treated him as she treats everyone she wants to keep at arm’s length. And then it turns out he, too, has his difference. He just doesn’t wear it on his face like she does. (Or, perhaps he does, and she was just too stupid to notice.)

He, too, has his pain. And he shared it with her. Because he thinks of her as his friend.

She wanders despondently through her fortress and finds not Solas, but Varric, and he takes her to the Herald’s Rest and makes her play a card game she still doesn’t quite grasp and drink terrible ale until she confesses that she thinks she is probably a bigot, or at least an idiot. He sets his own mug aside, then, and gives her a consoling pat on the shoulder. “We all are, in some respect,” he tells her.

“Josephine tried to tell me once, when I said to her I think Cassandra doesn’t like people who aren’t human. Fenedhis, Sera tells me all the time! All this victimhood. I just never listen. I’m so … I’m so obsessed with my own face, I forget to look past others’…”

She slumps forward, burying her face in the crook of her elbow. The table stinks of spilled beer.

“Well, better late than never,” Varric says. “So you finally discovered humans are people too! No point in beating yourself up over not getting it sooner. Most never get it. At least you’re so ridiculously helpful and polite to everyone, they’ll never have noticed you distrust them because of their tiny ears.“

She lifts her head and glares at him, but he laughs and tells her it really is a good thing. That if she wants to, she can become friends with them for real now. And even if she doesn’t, no harm has been done.

“Not Vivienne, though,” she mutters.

“No, probably not Vivienne.“

But Dorian. And Cassandra, and Josephine and the others. Perhaps, if she gets to know them a little better, it will turn out that some of them do know what it is like to be different. Perhaps it is not so unthinkable that they might be clan, too.


	59. Chapter 59

“Did it ever strike you as strange,” Solas asks, “how people treat wolves with both fear and reverence?”

Ellana runs her fingertips along the weathered lines of the statue before her. She does not need to think long before she answers, “No. Not really.” She glances at him. He stands a few paces away, regarding her, eyebrows raised expectantly. A strange feeling comes over her, that this is some sort of test. “Fear and reverence are tightly intertwined. Especially in humans, I think. Just see how easily people fall to worshipping the Old Gods, or demons, or dragons. Or Corypheus.”

“That much is true,” he nods. “Is there more to it, do you think?”

She smiles. “Wolves are not so unlike us, are they? It is easy to picture them as an ideal. Fierce in combat, loyal, protective of their flock. Intelligent.”

She looks at the ancient wolf’s face and sets her hand gently on its muzzle. In the dark, it looks almost alive, and the stone still carries some of the day’s warmth. Twilight comes early in the Emerald Graves. Dusk is settling over the ruin where they’ve set up camp, and all lines soften and blur. Everything is green, lush, fragrant. She likes it here, she realises. She wishes she had more time to simply explore, to climb trees, to sleep and walk the Fade with Solas. Perhaps, once this is all over … For now, she will have to settle for moments like this one, moments of relative solitude, of contemplation and quiet conversation.

“Makes me wonder,” she muses out loud, “about Fen’Harel. If what my people believe is true, he is a trickster, a betrayer of his kind. Why should a trickster be represented by a creature considered stalwart and trustworthy? And if we are wrong … is he truly a trickster? Then again, perhaps wearing the face of a wolf is a trick in itself…”

Solas touches her arm and she starts, turning to face him. Teeth gleam white between parted lips as he smiles in the deepening dark. “I really should stop being surprised,” he mumbles, and leans down to press his lips against hers.

She finds herself trapped between his body and the wolf’s and whimpers into the kiss. Whatever the test may have been, it seems she passed.


	60. Chapter 60

“You always carry your things.” She stared at the view without seeing it. They were … somewhere, a memory so old it was hazy and indistinct, like the land had forgotten itself. With so little to see around her, she instead lost herself in thought. “Everywhere we go, in the solid world, you carry your belongings with you.”

“I have few possessions. It is hardly a bother,” he said.

But it bothered her, and she tried to find a way to tell him.

“It’s like … like you expect you might be leaving any minute.”

She shot him a glance. His expression was inscrutable as ever and she sighed quietly, swallowing her questions. Some were better not asked.

Suddenly he smiled and said, “Of course I’m not leaving! Not with Corypheus still at large. I’m seeing this through to the end.”

Managing a smile and a nod, she turned and started walking towards the nearest blurred feature of that shifting dreamscape. She hadn’t asked, but he had answered. And as so often was the case with him, his answer only gave rise to more questions that she dare not ask.

He caught up and was beside her, and she chased her anxiety away by taking his hand. He was here now.


	61. Chapter 61

“See, the thing about nobs is that they’re pissin’ stupid,” Sera sniggers and waves her goblet at the throng of lace and ruffles. “Anyone can wear a mask!”

Ellana snorts. “Anyone who can afford one, anyway.” The porcelain covering her face makes her voice echo weirdly, and she dislikes the way it traps her breath against her face. It feels moist and clammy. But Sera is right: With the right clothes and the right amount of coin for wine at the right café, no one questions their presence. No one stares at her, no one speaks of her in half-hushed whispers as they pass. She’s just some guy in a mask.

“Right. Think they got any more of those cannypies?”

“Canapés.”

“Whatever, I’m gonna go check!”

Sera disappears as she will, quickly and silently. For all her boisterous manner, she moves like something smooth and slick, something that hunts at night. She would make a terrific addition to any Dalish clan, Ellana reflects with a wry smile.

The word ‘inquisitor’ drifts through the crowd, catching her ear. A man and two women (she judges them to be lesser nobility) have just paused in the street outside the café and appear to be discussing her. When Sera returns, she quickly hushes her and nods in their direction.

The man snarls: “‘Herald of Andraste’. Pah! Dog-piss! She is nothing but a political upstart. And now the Empress has gone and given a title to an _elf!_ Has to be her doing. Mark my words, we will have an elven uprising before long. Gaspard should have been Emperor. He would know to deal with the knife-ears as they deserve.”

“I hear the Inquisitor is a Dalish mage. They are hardly any better than Tevinter!” one of the women whispers conspiratorially. “Some say that the villages en route to Skyhold are missing children…”

Sera starts to rise, but Ellana shakes her head minutely.

“Oh, Maribelle, you always listen to such silly stories.” The woman who speaks last sounds older than the others, and the cut of her dress is more expensive. Her accent is Fereldan. “Inquisitor Lavellan is nothing special. I was at the Grand Ball, you know.”

“Oh yes!” The woman called Maribelle is breathless with excitement. “So you have met her! What was she like?”

“We didn’t speak, but from what I heard, she was very polite. For an elf, I expect … And she danced surprisingly well.”

“Is she as freakish to look at as I’ve heard?” the man wonders. His voice is flat with disinterest and measured disdain, but he can’t seem to stop a note of malign curiousity creeping into it.

“Is she covered in scars? I heard she’s covered in scars!” Maribelle gasps.

The older woman nods. “Yes. But even without them…” She finally slips, her measured tone giving way to the sort of loud whisper one uses for scandalous gossip. “Her hair is white, her skin so pale she looks like a ghost. Then there’s those huge elvish eyes of the strangest hue, and enormous ears, and her _nose_ …”

“Clearly Fade-touched,” the man snorts. “There is something not right about her, I tell you…”

The thing about masks is that they give the wearer a false sense of security. Ellana knows that if her face hadn’t been covered, she would appear calm and collected. Instead, beneath the porcelain, her lip trembles treacherously. Her shoulders slump and she is balling her hands into tight little fists in her lap.

Sera’s hand covers one of hers. Her voice uncharacteristically soft, she says, “D’you wanna maybe go somewhere else?”

Ellana nods.

They discard their noble outfits to appear instead as commoners. Ellana pulls her hood down over her face as they walk the streets.

“Want some cake?” Sera grins as they pass a fancy pâtisserie.

They could have paid the baker, but they don’t. This is Sera’s day, after all, and from the looks of things, the baker could definitely afford to support the Inquisition with a few sweets.

Soon they are running. Sera’s wild laughter bounces between walls like pearls dropped from the rooftops, and it’s so contagious Ellana can’t help but smile. They find themselves by the docks, climb a stack of crates and hide in a nook overlooking the water. Sera brings out the crumbling stash of pastries and they pick through it, reviewing the bizarre tastes of nobility in increasingly rowdy terms. Then they simply sit quietly together, relaxing in the sun. Ellana still keeps her hood low, shadowing her face. Her skin burns too easily, she tells herself.

“I don’t think you’re ugly,” Sera says suddenly, breaking the silence. “You’re just different, yeah? Rich tits don’t like difference. That’s why they wear masks, so they’ll all look the same as each other. And I like your hair.”

Ellana reaches up, running a finger over the ridges criscrossing her right cheek. They feel tight today, pulling at her skin. “You’ve never asked about my scars,” she says.

“Eh, none of my business, right? ’Sides, scars isn’t who you are, it’s just stuff that happened, innit? You wanna tell me, you will, I don’t have to push. I’m not the ‘inquisitor’ here. Anyway, I know I give you crap for being too elfy and weird with the magic and stuff, but that’s different. Because we have roof-time, yeah? Whatever those arse-hats said, you’re alright.”

Ellana thinks back on the day they went pranking her advisors, and is thankful that she took the chance.


	62. Chapter 62

“Take off your boots.”

Solas smiles at her baffled expression; a soft, encouraging smile.

“How long has it been since you walked barefoot? When did you last feel the earth against the soles of your feet?”

Ellana shakes her head. “I don’t know. A long time,” she says quietly.

“Then take off your boots. Walk with me.”

She sits down on the parched ground, tugging at her tall leather boots somewhat self-consciously. Her feet will smell, she thinks. They are sore and blistery and they will smell. But she takes off her boots anyway.

They leave the camp and descend into the canyon. Cool shade envelops them, and Ellana shrugs off her hood, pulling her hand through her hair as she walks with Solas beneath the rocky arches. The Forbidden Oasis is safe now, cleared of enemies and protected by Inquisition troops. Solasan has been investigated. All that is left is humming insects, tuskets rooting in the shade, the constant howl and hiss of desert wind and cascading water. It is breathtakingly beautiful.

Hand in hand, they wade into the shallow pools before the temple entrance. A breeze tugs at the waterfalls; the air is so moist here that greenery clings to every surface. Water washes over her aching feet.

“Wait,” Solas whispers, stopping.

For a minute or two, maybe more, they stand in silence. Then suddenly the sun comes around a bend and its rays hit the mist, throwing dazzling rainbows across the oasis. Ellana gasps, eyes widening in wonder. He squeezes her hand.

“To think this happens every day, and rarely with anyone here to see it. Every day, this particular configuration of rocks and water and sunlight come together to create such wonder. Wonder without purpose.”

“How do you know it is without purpose?” she asks.

He gives a gentle chuckle. “I suppose one could posit that the Maker or the Creators or some other god made this oasis for the benefit of whatever people they loved best.”

Ellana considers his words, looks for the unasked question. Eventually she says, “I prefer to believe that the world is beautiful in its own right. That even if there were no people in it, it would be worth saving.”

He turns to her and lifts a hand to touch her cheek, shaking his head at some hidden thought. “Ma vhenan,” he murmurs, voice blending with the waterfall’s. Then he suddenly laughs and pulls her in underneath the streaming water, and she shrieks and giggles hopelessly as her clothes soak through in a matter of moments. A frightened tusket erupts from where it was hidden in a shrub and knocks them over as it thunders past; they tumble into the shallow water, laughing and flailing.

At last they manage to sit up and catch their breath. She watches his face as he gently plucks strands of wet hair from her own and tucks them behind her ears. His lashes are wet and water runs down his cheeks. It makes it look like he has been crying. But his eyes are gleaming, and he leans forward to kiss the droplets on her own cheeks away, and whispers that he loves her.


	63. Chapter 63

Underneath an endless sky, cradled by the meadow, stars wheeling above them. Naked limbs intertwined, skin against skin, a steady rhythm like the beating of a heart, accompanied by whispering soft caresses. A different sort of dance.

“Is it different, here? Am I?” she asked as they pulled apart, her eyes not yet fully open and he so close that he was out of focus.

“Many things are different here,” he said and traced the lines of her face with his fingers. His voice was quiet and smooth, brushing against her like velvet. “To what do you refer?”

“Kissing me, of course. Am I different? Do my lips taste of the Beyond?”

He paused, blurred features coalescing into a distant expression that made him look hard, statuesque. “Yes,” he said finally, “It is different. You are different.”

But he would not say how, and she never told him that he was not. He was always exactly himself. Always exactly Solas. And she never told him that it sometimes frightened her that she didn’t really know who, or what, that was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> End of Arc Five, and we're nearing the end of this particular journey.


	64. Arc Six

“Do as you will with the Well of Sorrows, Inquisitor,” Morrigan sighs. “But be careful.”

Ellana turns toward the water, but before she can step into it Solas pulls her aside. He speaks in an urgent whisper, his eyebrows drawn up beseechingly, fingers digging into her arm almost painfully. “Don’t drink of the well. Please, vhenan, I _beg_ you.”

She stares at him in shock, glances over her shoulder at the well, then back at Solas. He is begging her?

“You cannot know what it will do to you,” he continues. “Da’len, _please_. Let Morrigan take this risk.”

And there it is, again. She is a child fumbling in the dark, just a silly Dalish girl who knows nothing, understands nothing. Here they are in the temple of her own goddess, one he doesn’t even believe in … and he is warning her away, but not telling her anything useful. She clenches her jaw angrily. “How am I any less fit to drink of the well than Morrigan? Is it not more appropriate that I, one of the _people_ , partake in the knowledge hidden here, reclaim what is rightfully ours? I am already a servant of Mythal. I wear her marks on my face, just like Abelas!”

She doesn’t tell him that she already knows the danger. That she can feel the voices of aeons past reaching towards her, grasping at her mind. The geas they would set upon her lays thick in the air. Even Morrigan can feel it, though she doesn’t think the witch understands it, skepticism clouding her judgment. But Ellana knows. And Solas knows, too, of that she is sure. Will he tell her what it means?

“Da’len–”

She snaps, “Don’t _da’len_ me, Solas. Not here, not now. Not unless you tell me exactly why you don’t want me to do this. If you would be my elder, then guide me. Otherwise…”

He looks at her, face falling for a moment before settling in its usual grim mask. He lets go of her arm, and says nothing.

“I thought not,” she sighs quietly, shaking her head as she turns away from him and walks back toward the well. Still, she cannot help but hope. Every hesitant step she takes towards the water comes with expectation; he will speak up. Soon. Next step. He will stop her again, he will try to save her from whatever fate it is he fears she will suffer. Next step…

He does not.

She pushes him from her mind, and steps into the well.


	65. Chapter 65

“Third time’s the charm…”

His voice blurred by a feverish fog clogging all her senses. Her hand hovers in front of her face, waving indistinctly. She coughs. He gives her something to drink, an elfroot infusion she thinks, and minutes later her mind clears enough for emotions other than fatigue to take hold. It’s unpleasant.

“What’re you on about?” Ellana mutters.

Solas gives her a mirthless smile. Even in the hazy torchlight he looks tired, worn. Dark pouches under his eyes. “Something humans say. This is the third time I sit by your bed while you hover on the brink of death.”

“So you’re hoping I’ll actually die this time?” she snorts, trying for a smile, unsure if she succeeds.

“I never suggested the saying was appropriate to the occasion.”

He helps her sit up against a saddle. Pain shoots through her leg; it feels thicker than her torso, stiff and pulsating. Though her body is covered with a thick blanket, her leg lies bare, but she avoids looking at it. Solas is rummaging through a pack; she suspects he means to have her eat something. She won’t.

“Fenedhis. This is a stupid way to die,” she sighs. “After all this. After I came so far.”

Some forest animal … she isn’t even sure what manner of beast it was, or why it attacked. Perhaps she stumbled into its nest. The details are a blur, but she remembers searing pain as teeth sunk into her flesh. Poison, or an infection. No one in the small retinue escorting her back to Skyhold is sure. The poultices in their supplies did nothing, and Solas cannot heal her. In a matter of hours the swelling reached her thigh, she developed a fever and could no longer ride.

Now it is night, and she doesn’t know how long she has been lying on this pallet. Stars gleam in the few patches of sky not obscured by leaves. The voices in her head are quiet, drowned out by feverish pounding.

“You are not going to die.”

“I’m not afraid to die. In fact,” she sighs quietly, “I’m surprised I’m still here. I just thought … I’d go out in a blaze of glory. You know?”

“You’re _not_ going to die,” Solas repeats, the sharpness of his voice making the words an order and pulling her back into herself. He has given up on his pack, takes hold of her hand instead. “We have sent word. A skilled healer and alchemist will be here in the morning. You just … have to hang on for a few more hours.”

His voice catches on the last few words and she sees the pain on his face before he turns away and composes himself. Sad smile on her lips. Exhaustion. Slipping away again but she clings to him, weakly in body but with all the more fervour in spirit. If she is to die now, she needs to be with him. No time to waste with dreamless sleep or fever-poisoned Fade walks.

“Solas…”

“Do you remember when I took you to the dungeon in Haven, to show where I watched over you?”

“In the Fade. Yes.”

“I was surprised when you came to me in the rotunda reflection. Pleased, too. To find you in the Fade was no easy task. After that first time, you led me through such merry chases … and then, at last, you sought me out.”

“I kissed you.”

Solas smiles. “Impulsive and ill-considered, as I recall describing it. In fact, very unlike you.”

“Full of surprises, me,” she mumbles. Her eyes are trying to close. She wills them open, focuses on his face, traces his profile. “When was the second time you watched over me?”

“After the attack on Haven. You were out for a day after Cullen found you. I was … very worried. More worried than I cared to admit, even to myself.”

She smiles vaguely. “Do you wish I hadn’t done it? Kissed you?”

“No, vhenan.” He puts a hand on her cheek, runs his thumb along the cheekbone. Her nerves raw with fever, it feels like she has no skin. She doesn’t mind. “The fear of losing you is hard to bear, but what we have … it is worth it.”

She wants to tell him that she loves him but her lips won’t move. Something shimmers in his eyes and she thinks it might be tears, but then again it may just as well be firelight or stars or friendly wisps and then her own eyes close and she forgets how to open them again.

Ellana awakes the next day with her body whole and sound, if exhausted. The healer arrived just in time, and they continue on to Skyhold.


	66. Chapter 66

He changes her. He tells her she is beautiful. Even as he backs away from her, he calls her his heart.

He tells her he is sorry, and leaves.

She clutches at her belly and sinks to the ground as if stabbed, as if something reached inside her and ripped her apart and it is all she can do to try to keep herself together physically with her hands but she can’t, she is pouring into the ground in great heaving sobs, self draining away to make place for the pain.


	67. Chapter 67

Anger awaits her at Skyhold. Seeing the door to the rotunda is enough to ignite it, to start a hot simmer beneath her skin, a burning behind her eyes. She seeks him out, demanding answers in clipped tones. Pain chokes her voice as she asks him to explain, one last time. He promises to do so … after Corypheus is dead.

“Everything will be made clear,” he says. She wants to trust him, but she can’t. Nothing is ever clear with Solas. She had thought their love was the one thing she could be sure of, but not even that was to be trusted. The moment she turns away from him and leaves, the anger burns her pain away once more. She passes through the throng in the throne room with nary a glance at the nameless dignitaries that try to greet her and climbs the steps to her quarters three at a time. Rage-fuelled rift magic pushes at the air around her; she nearly throws the last door off its hinges when she enters. She paces, pulling at her hair, wanting to scream but choking whenever she tries.

On her desk sits her mirror with filigree like the horns of halla. She picks it up and she sees her face, her ghastly scarred face, terrible and naked without the vallaslin that adorned her cheekbones for so long, and she throws it into a wall and the mirror smashes, showering the floor with fragments of glass. She finds a bottle of wine and drinks without tasting. The bottle joins the mirror’s fate before she has finished even half of its contents, and then she gets another one and stands on her balcony as she doggedly drinks it down, staring unseeingly at the horizon.

Eventually, she falls asleep and left hateful messages for him in the Fade, the part where it mirrored his rotunda, where they had met many times as a starting point for their lessons and explorations. ‘LIAR’, ‘THIEF’, her mind carved into his desk. She wasn’t even sure if it was possible to do something like this, if her messages would be as ephemeral as dreams or if they would be there when he returned. If he was even gone. For all she knew, he was watching her from the eyes of the frescoes on the wall, laughing at her childish antics.

It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. She sat at his desk, ripped pages from a dream-reflected book and smeared them with red ink:

“You called me your heart, but what of mine? You stole it, tricked me into giving it away, and made it your own. Now I have no heart.

“Everyone is trying to make me into something I am not. I thought I found shelter in you, but you were just as bad. Worse. The Anchor didn’t change me, being named Herald or Inquisitor didn’t change me, but you did. You made me turn away from myself. By ~~loving me~~ CLAIMING to love me you made me change myself for you.

“You scorn my people and speak ill of my gods. I am dedicated to Mythal, and you question that I would serve her, convince me to remove the markings I wore so proudly. You’ve poisoned my faith.

“I was going to be Keeper. I’ve tried to protect my clan. I left them to keep them safe. But you? You’re not Dalish, not city born. You are in between and outside. You poke and prod and pry into the past of people you don’t care for, but show nothing of yourself. You ARE nothing. You are no one.

“Trickster, the Nightmare called you. I think it was right, I think you have dedicated your life to the Dread Wolf himself. Let him have you, then.

“Fen’Harel chase you to the ends of the world. I never want you in my dreams again.”

Each scrap of paper, discarded. The letters littered the floor like leaves.

Momentarily drained after pouring pain onto paper she lifted her head and stared at the frescoes. They were beautiful, here even more so than in the solid world. In the Fade, the colours glowed from within, telling their stories with absolute perfection of clarity. She wanted to destroy them, but could not bring herself to even try. At last, she collapsed in impotent rage, crying, screaming, pounding the desk with her fists, clawing at the grain. Outside the walls, she felt the Fade thicken with spirits. This, finally, gave her pause.

She left, never to come back.

In her room a rift has opened when she wakes, the Anchor pulsating painfully in her hand as a rage demon claws its way through the veil. She laughs as they fight; with tears streaming down her face she laughs and pummels it with rift magic and closes the torn air with a snap of her fingers. Pitiful. Such a pitiful thing. Her and the demon both. She wonders what manner of spirit it was before her rage pulled it through and polluted it. She wonders if it was someone’s friend.

Blood is dripping from her arm unheeded, she cannot feel the wound. She stares at the ruined carpet. Mirror glass has melted into the floor. She lies down and closes her eyes.

This is where Varric finds her the next morning.


	68. Chapter 68

The Inquisitor is ill and has taken to her bed, such is the official story. In the Inquisitor’s bed lies Ellana, curled up and weeping.

Downstairs, her advisors are probably arguing about how to find Corypheus and slay him before he brings more ruin upon the world, Leliana pulling at her web of informants while Cullen tries to gather and coordinate what’s left of their armies scattered in the Arbor Wilds. She feels ashamed that she doesn’t care. She feels ashamed that she is failing as Keeper, as protector. She feels ashamed that she cannot even listen to the whispers in her head. That all she cares about, right now, is her own self and her pain, her confusion.

She feels trapped in her own mind, her thoughts wandering an endless labyrinth. Memories hover at the edges of her consciousness, memories of happiness, of Solas, of the two in conjunction. They try to force themselves on her. Mostly she shies away. Sometimes she throws herself into them, lets them rip her apart.

Sometimes she sleeps, fitfully, waking up as soon as her mind enters a dream. She makes strong, bitter tea and sweetens it with honey to make it drinkable. She can’t go there, not now; she is too afraid of what she will find. Or won’t.

“Your pain sings so loud, I can hear it even when the minstrel plays.”

Cole’s soft monotone reflects her misery. It startles her into wakefulness and she sits up straight, shooting wild-eyed looks about the room. He is crouched at the foot of her bed, staring at her with big watery eyes, clutching the brim of his hat. “Do you want me to help you?” he says. No matter how much he has embraced his spiritual self, he still looks like a child – open-faced and helpless.

She shakes her head. “I don’t think you can. I’m sorry, Cole.”

“No … You are probably right. It is all intertwined, tortuous tangles, I … I can’t find the ends to untie the knot.” He pauses for a while, then says quietly, “He hurts, too, but hides it.”

“Please don’t– I don’t want to–” She hides her face for a moment, then wipes at her eyes and gives a sudden, teary laugh. “After all this, isn’t it stupid how my instinct is to seek him out? That I want him to comfort me? He should be the last person I…” But Cole can’t possibly understand any of this. What does a spirit of compassion know of love? She hardly knows what it is herself. She has never loved before, not like this. Right now, she doubts if she ever will, again.

Cole’s mind touches hers, feathery light, flitting in and out so quietly and quickly that she wouldn’t have felt it if she hadn’t been so raw from pain. “You’re thinking of hugs. Would it help if I hugged you?”

She shrugs helplessly. Maybe it would, who’s to say? It can’t make anything worse. He appears beside her, puts an arm around her shoulders. It is painfully obvious that he isn’t human; everything about him is strange now. And still he tries to give her this most real and solid of comforts. After a moment, she leans on him and lets the tears flow.


	69. Chapter 69

She lies to Sera. She doesn’t even think about it, untruths just drip from her tongue like oil on tumultuous water. Anything to make her calm down, stop her confused religious ranting. Anything to make Sera not push her away.

Besides, what is the point of trying to stay true to herself and her heritage, when she doesn’t truly know who she is or what she believes anymore? Let Sera think she’s gone less elfy. Let her think she has embraced being the Herald. It matters not.

“So much for ‘elven glory’, huh,” Sera mutters when they’ve found a suitable roof to sit on.

Ellana hasn’t told her about Solas – it seems she and all the others just know anyway. Varric, perhaps, or Cole. For once, it doesn’t annoy her that people talk. In fact she feels almost grateful to the grapevine that she didn’t have to be the one to tell Sera about it.

Sera throws twigs off the roof with small, precise flicks of her wrist. “Want me to stick an arrow in his face?”

“Don’t think I haven’t considered it,” Ellana sighs.

“What, really? _You?_ Miss Stuffy McStraightlaced, thinking about revenge? Wow,” Sera shakes her head, looking quite taken aback. “Didn’t see that one coming.”

“Full of surprises, me.”

“Hey, about face-arrows and that, I’m sorry about–”

“Sera, please shut up and pass me the cookies.”


	70. Chapter 70

Dorian brings her a bottle whose contents smell like death and destruction. They drink it curled up on her sofa and he tells her tales of his misspent youth. She thinks they are mostly made up, but sometimes, they make her smile.


	71. Chapter 71

And so a week passes. Ellana vacillates between rage and grief and feeling nothing at all.

Thinking of the rituals in the Temple of Mythal, she snorts derisively at herself. Some fine example of elvhen virtue she is, unable to settle on a path, much less walk it. But time wears on her and eventually she finds herself in a state of emotional fatigue. She can see him now, even speak to him without falling apart. As long as she doesn’t meet his eyes.

They are both exceedingly polite, talking only of their mission. They no longer litter their speech with Elvish. He calls her ‘Inquisitor’, and every time he does something within her twists into a painful knot even as he grows more distant. She calls him nothing at all.

When he isn’t looking, she searches his face for some trace of regret.


	72. Chapter 72

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reference: [Banter](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmuoQnXLzpM)

As her heart’s turmoil calms somewhat, the whispers in Ellana’s mind tug at her with ever more urgency. To the Altar of Mythal. Despite herself, she asks Solas to come along. She has no idea what she thinks will happen, but perhaps Mythal will truly come to her, and if so, she wants him to witness it.

Cole reads his mind as they travel. She stops, tense, hardly daring to look behind her. Solas’ words, echoed from Cole’s mouth. “You are free. You are so beautiful.” Does he have to dig deep to find them, or is the memory right there, at the top of Solas’ mind?

Tears burn in her eyes. She blinks until they are gone before she turns around to look at them. Cole plucks thoughts from her own mind, tells Solas of her embarrassment, her confusion. But surely Solas must know already. Surely he knows how she lies awake at night and wonders what made him turn away. He claimed it has nothing to do with her, but how could she trust him? So she asks herself: What among her myriad of choices, big ones and little, made their love an impossibility? Was it the Well of Sorrows? He could have stopped her, had he truly wished to. Or was it not what she did, but who she is? Did he simply get bored when the vallaslin were gone and he was finished reshaping her?

She encourages Cole’s prying, but Solas shuts him out of his mind. Part of her wants to ask what Cole was talking about. Part of her wants to ask how Solas could close his mind so quickly, so completely … but she is done asking Solas questions.

They move on. She gets ready to face her goddess.


	73. Chapter 73

She asks Leliana what she would do if she were Divine. Since Valence, she is no longer frightened of her spymaster; the edge in her voice seems to have gone. Once, she catches her humming to herself, the first time Ellana has heard her sing since the destruction of Haven. And now she speaks of the Chantry, of what it could be, _should_ be, and Ellana finds herself strangely moved.

As she listens, she considers her own faith. With a pang of sadness, she realises that she cannot remember when last she prayed.

She has met her goddess, or some aspect of her. It was not what she had expected, although truth be told she’s not sure if she expected anything at all. Solas has chipped inexorably away at the foundations of her beliefs for such a long time and she was so caught up in loving him that she hardly noticed how little there was left. Not until she faced Mythal-as-Flemeth, and was barely surprised.

For good or ill, she is now bound to the will of Asha’Bellanar, and she knows she should rage against her loss of freedom. But she walked into it willingly in one last act of defiance, one last desperate act to prove to Solas that her faith stood strong against his onslaught. It may have crushed her, and perhaps it was what destroyed them, but it was her choice.

So she now jumps to Mythal’s whims, instead of Solas’ – it makes little difference to her. A leash may be pulled in either direction, Vivienne once pointed out. But it is still a leash. She wonders if he even realises he had been holding it.

Leliana wants to welcome elves into the Chantry. And dwarves, and qunari. Ellana doesn’t believe in the Maker, but it is no longer because she sees him as a shemlen attempt at subverting her own, _true_ gods. Rather, she is leaning toward Morrigan’s way of seeing things: What are gods, but beings so powerful they surpass the natural world? She has met Mythal and she was not quite what she was made out to be. Why should the Maker be any different? For all she knows, the Maker may simply be another aspect of Elgar’nan, or the sun. Regardless; if he exists at all, he is nowhere to be seen.

But if Leliana leads the Chantry, if she truly believes everyone deserves love and forgiveness … perhaps it doesn’t matter whether the Maker exists or not.

She thinks of the first fight she had with Solas, a long time ago. Of the things she never said to him: That in her heart, she believes facts to be less important than truth. It doesn’t matter what stories people tell, doesn’t matter if they get their facts straight, as long as there is a truth in them that guides the listener toward fulfillment. And Leliana’s vision is one she would see fulfilled.

“In your heart shall burn an unquenchable flame,” the Nightingale quotes.

Perhaps, she ponders, it is time she actually listened to the Chant.


	74. Chapter 74

The throne room feels strange when it is empty, but once all candles are extinguished except the ones on Varric’s table she can pretend it is a much smaller room. It is late, Ellana sits in a pool of light with Varric and Cole, Varric is dealing. He still hasn’t given up on teaching her enough Wicked Grace strategy that she might actually win a game every once in a while. She thinks he will give up eventually, hopes dashed, but welcomes the distraction.

“Varric, can I ask you a question?” Cole says.

“You just did, kid,” the dwarf chuckles. “Besides, when have I ever not been fine with you asking me questions?”

“I was wondering about love. It’s confusing.”

“Most people feel that way, I think.”

“It seems like love is always tangled up with pain. And yet people do not want to be without it. They cling to it, clasp it close, hug the hurt. Like Dorian does with his father, like you do, like she does. People would rather love and hurt than neither.”

Varric looks at her as if to ask permission to pursue the topic. She gives a small shrug, plucking at her cards. Her hand is full of Serpents and an Angel of Truth; she wonders what that means.

“I think … Well. You’re a spirit of compassion, right?”

“Yes,” Cole nods. “That is what I am.”

“Well, us regular mortals don’t feel compassion the way you do obviously, because we can’t read people’s minds. But we do feel it. When we love someone, we feel it very strongly. We share their joys and their burdens. When two people love each other, that can be the most beautiful thing.”

“Oh! It … accumulates, amplifies, abounds – a swelling storm of sympathy…”

The door to the rotunda begins to open, just a crack, then pauses. Ellana notices, but the other two are too engrossed in their conversation.

“Yes. Damn, I really should employ you as a ghost writer. Hah, a spirit writer! Anyway, the thing is, even at its most painful, love is often beautiful. And it shapes us, makes us what we are. Even if the love one feels is unrequited, or one person holds back or is unable to show their love…”

“She named him elder, he called her his heart. But now there’s a hole where her heart was, hollow echoes, empty halls, haunted, howling. She looks for him in her dreams, but pretends not to.”

“Kid…”

Ellana stares at her cards, vaguely aware how Varric glances at her. Something trips inside her, rusty wheels grinding into a new configuration like someone pulled a lever, and she lets go. She pours herself into Cole, her hands trembling faintly as he puts words to her pain.

“Fade-touched, she mocks herself, because he only ever touched her in the place where she has no scars. And he all eyes of steel and cryptic smiles, was he touched at all? She thought so but now she doesn’t know.” Cole sits rigid, staring blankly as he speaks. He does this more often these days, forgetting to move, as though his body has become a mere inconvenience. “Rough cloth underneath her fingertips, _Don't go!_ , _Don’t leave me!_ – it ends the same as it started. In another world, he said, but why not this one? Another unanswered question. Did he always know, she wonders, was he so cold, cruel, callous? Cups of tea and counting her windowpanes, she thinks she will be awake, alone and aching, always…”

“Hey. Hey! Kid, that’s enough. I think maybe you should go and be compassionate somewhere else for now, okay?”

Cole drops his cards on the table, they slide across it with a quiet hiss. He blinks at them, coming back to himself. “Yes,” he says, looking from Varric to Ellana and back. Behind him, the door shuts without a sound.

“I’ll check on you later, promise,” Varric says, and flinches slightly when the spirit abruptly disappears. Ellana can tell he wishes Cole had walked out. He is still disappointed. Now he turns to her, setting his cards face down on the table. He frowns. “What the hell was that all about?”

She doesn’t answer.

“He hardly ever does this with you. And now this? Did you _see_ him? You could have stopped him.”

She flashes him a glance. “Why? Is the Inquisitor not allowed to feel pain? You would rather I carry this alone?“

Varric deflates, exhaling abruptly as though punched in the stomach. “No. That’s not what I meant. I’m sorry. I was just … why would you let him get so caught up in pain he can’t heal? Why now?“

“You’ll think less of me if I tell you,” she mumbles, shuffling her cards aimlessly.

“Try me.”

“I think … I thought _he_ was listening. I wanted him to hear.”

“Oh. Well. Shit…”

“I told you you’d think less of me,” she sighs, finally setting her cards down. She starts to rise, but he leans over and puts a hand on her arm. It’s enormous, warm and heavy, her arm like a twig underneath it. Child of the stone, Solas always calls him, putting distance between them. Ellana finds the dwarf’s unquestionable solidity comforting. She sits back down.

Varric says her name. She thinks it may be the first time. He pronounces it perfectly, the way an elf would. He looks into her eyes and his words are heavy with sincerity when he speaks: “Listen to me. I don’t think less of you.” In a softer voice, he continues, “If you want to talk about it, I’m here. You don’t have to go through Cole. And you don’t have to be alone. I know no one can replace him, but … There are other ways to be loved.”


	75. Chapter 75

She went back to her tree, but it wasn’t the same. Her dreams were much too conscious these days, she was too aware of all the strange details, of the Black City hovering in the distant sky.

“You wear your scars, now.”

Of course she did. Of course he would notice. She refused to look at him. “What are you doing here?” she asked flatly.

“How do you know it is truly me? I may just be part of the dream, a figment.”

She forgot not to look and turned her head, staring at him. He sat on the next branch over, giving her a sideways glance. He was terrifyingly familiar; the rough tunic, the charm on its leather thongs, his skin glowing golden in the eternal sun of this place. The angles and planes of his face, the cut of his jaw, the dome of his skull, every feature sharp and timeless like marble. And in his eyes, so familiar a gleam.

How could she ever have thought him plain to look at?

“No,” she said when she could finally breathe again. “I cannot dream you true. I have tried, but you appear as my heart sees you, not as you are. I know you. You are not of my heart.”

He smiled, turning to face her properly. “Your growth astounds me. You have learned so much. And you continue, even now.”

“It seems I didn’t need you as much as either of us thought,” she said coolly, looking away from him but glancing back immediately to catch the look on his face. It was placid, somewhat sorrowful.

He was quiet for a time. Finally he said, “That is good.”

She slumped, closing her eyes for a moment. “I miss you,” she whispered, her voice breaking.

When she opened her eyes he was no longer there.


	76. Chapter 76

Solas forgets his promise, if he ever intended to keep it.

What turns out to be his last words to Ellana settle around her throat like a collar, choking her. She has no time to respond, because the others are coming, the ones who didn’t make it onto the rising rocks and had to watch their battle with Corypheus from afar, and now they need to see her, to know that she’s alive. They could have seen nothing more than flashing lights and clashing dragons from the ground, no inkling given as to which way the tide of battle flowed. She wonders if their terror was akin to hers; if not knowing what was going on was better or worse than knowing.

It doesn’t matter now. It is over, and Solas tells her _what they had was_ _real_ , and she wants to scream at him but she can’t because she’s the Inquisitor and she has just saved the world. Again.

So she turns away from him, because she doesn’t know that he is leaving.


	77. Chapter 77

Thedas celebrates, Skyhold celebrates, and sometimes when she joins in she forgets about Solas for a minute. Her friends say they are leaving but not yet, not right now, and Ellana smiles and drinks to victory and tells them how she couldn’t have done it without them. Her leadership extolled to the skies, she shakes her head inside and wonders how they cannot see that she just did what had to be done at the time, that the Anchor gave her no choice. And now, the river of fate has dumped her little boat in a vast ocean and she finds that it is suddenly a ship and that she is expected to steer it, with no clear goal in sight.

She is terrified that her friends might leave her here alone, and yet wants them gone so that there will be no one left to watch her pretend. Pretend to know what she is doing, pretend to be contented, to be happy.

No one speaks to her of Solas except Leliana, who says she has her people looking for him but doubts they will find him if he does not wish to be found. Ellana knows she is right, and doesn’t raise the topic again. When she learns that the village where he claimed to have been born has lain in ruins for centuries, she is not surprised.

Sometimes she finds herself aimlessly wandering Skyhold, like she is searching for something. She gravitates to the rotunda, peering at the frescoes as though they might carry a message for her, willing them to tell her something new. She laughs at the steward who suggests she has someone finish the last one, and then sends him a fruit basket. She doesn’t know if it’s the same steward she laughed at once before.

The frescoes remain as silent as the mosaics in the Temple of Mythal, and as beautiful.

For a little time, she considers seeking out the Dalish of the Exalted Plains and have her vallaslin replaced, but she quickly realises it would be impossible. She cannot turn back, only move on. Instead, she goes to Val Royeaux with Sera and has one of the Friends tattoo her wrist with a bracelet whose shape hints of fingers. A reminder to never again let someone else’s dreams become more important than her own.

Once, she gathers the courage to ask the only person who might have known Solas better than herself. Cole stares at her blankly for a moment, and then speaks with his words, his voice. Solas has erased himself from Cole’s memory – not entirely, but all that was important. That he could do something like this is astounding in itself, and it becomes all the more apparent that he was never who he claimed to be.

She is strangely untroubled by this. Somehow she feels almost relieved that the possibility of learning about him, his feelings and his past and the path he walks, has been taken from her. At this point, she isn’t sure she wants to see him again.

With him gone, perhaps she can heal. And Solas is well and truly gone. Like a dream, he was completely real one moment, fading the next, gone like he was never there. Like a dream he was her whole world for a time, and now it is as though she woke up and he never existed.

He is gone, leaving her nothing to remember him by; nothing but the absence of what he took from her.

Varric and Sera give her a new mirror, and slowly she gets used to her new face. She stares at it – the arch of her forehead, the hairless ridges of her brow, the large nose, the delicate chin. Dark scars crisscrossing her cheeks and jaw, cutting into her small pink mouth like wrinkles. Her cheekbones smooth and white, no longer inked with the branches of Mythal.

Her eyes, not red, but the colour of a winter’s dawn: Pink and violet and blue.

_ You are free. You are so beautiful. _


	78. Chapter 78

She rose formless through deep dark waters, twirling through the warm void until she reached the surface. The beach was empty, as it should be, as she knew it would be. There would be no hunter on this journey. Before her was the forest where she would run with the wolves and climb with the squirrels, beyond that the meadow where she would dance with hare and halla.

She knew now that if she wanted to fly, she didn’t need wings to do so. But the wolves called to her and her legs ached to run. She smiled, and stepped forth.

 

~~~

 

_Postscript_

> My Maker, know my heart  
>  Take from me a life of sorrow  
>  Lift me from a world of pain  
>  Judge me worthy of Your endless pride
> 
> \--Transfigurations 12:3

 

 

~~~

**Author's Note:**

> I was going to put some concluding remarks here, but now that I am actually posting it, I forgot what I wanted to say. I understand that this piece isn't particularly audience friendly, so if you have read it all, I thank you for your perseverance. It was both difficult and exhilarating to write, for personal reasons. But I'm glad I did.
> 
> Now I am moving on to less introspective projects. As I said in the opening remarks, there will be a smutty spin-off taking place parallell to part of this fanfic, but it may be a little while as I am currently focusing on a sequel to my first longfic.
> 
> Again, if you have read this far, thank you.


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